120 The Han Kitab Authors
Out of the Chinese Muslim educational system emerged a net-
work of scholars that understood itself, and that should be under-
stood as, a school of scholarship. I intend this term in the sense that
it has been deployed by other scholars of education or scholarship
in China. Forming a school of scholarship was the way in which
Chinese Muslim scholars expressed and constructed Muslim iden-
tity in general. The process was twofold, in that it was directed
both at the community that it sought to represent (by “teaching”
Chinese Muslims who they were; what it meant to be Muslim and
Chinese) and to the broader Chinese society, its educated elite in
particular, in which they found themselves and of which they were
a part. That is, it was both prescriptive and descriptive. The con-
summate expression of this process is found in the body of texts
chosen for translation or created by Muslim scholars.
The emergence of something that can be termed a Chinese Mus-
lim “school” accompanied the new scholarly perception that Islam,
as a philosophical and scientific (mostly astronomy and medicine)
body of knowledge, was an important object of study. Thus, early
Qing Chinese Muslim scholars understood their activities as a form
of intellectual specialization. They saw themselves as Chinese lite-
rati who had as their object of study a specific “Dao”—Islam. The
study of Islam was certainly not the only scholarly activity with
which these scholars engaged, but it was the primary one. More im-
portant, it was the one that bounded and defined them. Just as other
schools of the period were defined by their methodology or literary
genre or object of study, so, too, was the Chinese Muslim school de-
fined by the subject matter that was its focus: the philosophy, ethics,
and science of Islam. I am not, of course, suggesting that the Chinese
Muslim school existed in any formal or externally affirmed way—it
was not recognized by Confucian elites, for example, as one of the
numerous schools of the period that fit under the umbrella of Con-
fucian literati culture, even though for Chinese Muslim scholars Is-
lamic study could fit there quite easily. This self-perception was
grounded in a broad intellectual sphere, one that, to the Han Kitab
scholars, was not an exclusively Confucian one.
The production of the Han Kitab texts was the result of com-
bined and often coordinated effort on the part of Chinese Muslim