122 The Han Kitab Authors
and the Chinese Islamic school are overlapping entities. The first is
primarily physical, whereas the second is conceptual, is predicated
on the existence of the first, and has connotations of a developing
ideological or cultural self-consciousness on the part of participants.
Schools as a framework for inquiry and a prism for Qing intel-
lectual history are highly applicable in the case of the Han Kitab
scholars. Elman has pointed some of the complexities of this
framework for inquiry, primary among them the fact that it is, in
many instances, far more difficult to distinguish different schools
than many scholars recognize. As he writes of the Qing:
Problems arise in any effort to make sense out of the many schools of
learning.... Traditional notions of a p’ai (faction), chia (school), or chia-
hsueh are less precise than traditional scholars and modern sinologists tend
to assume. In some cases, a school was little more than a vague category
whose members shared a textual tradition, geographical proximity, per-
sonal association, philosophic agreement, stylistic similarities, or combi-
nations of these. In many cases, a “school” would be defined merely to le-
gitimate the organizations that prepared its genealogy or provided
rationalization for the focus of scholarly activities peculiar to a region.^11
Fortunately for my argument, and for fairly obvious reasons,
clarification is easier in the case of the Chinese Muslims, where the
problem (in terms of broader Chinese historiography) is not so
much distinguishing different schools as it is acknowledging the ex-
istence of one in the first place. It also easy to separate different
“schools” in the Chinese Muslim case, for the obvious reason that
the school is not just one Chinese school among many but an Is-
lamic one. Just as Elman points out that the “schools approach” as a
mode of inquiry finds itself on “firmer ground” when referring to
“specific geographical areas during particular periods of time” (pre-
sumably because a geographic or chronological marker is more eas-
ily and clearly delineated than a content-based definition), I would
suggest that the introduction of the term “Muslim” into the discus-
sion similarly serves as a fairly radical and clear-cut definitional
guide.^12 (This is not, however, always the case, for Muslim scholars
did not at all times define themselves through Islamic categories.)
—————
11. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship, p. 2.
12. Ibid., pp. 4 – 5.