The Han Kitab Authors 123
Finding clear differences, however, is not the only problem. We do
well to heed the warning of Virginia Mayer-Chan, who rightly ob-
serves that “another serious problem with the concept of ‘schools’ is
its tendency to obscure similarities which cut across boundaries.”^13
The Chinese Muslim intellectual community appears to be at
risk of falling into both of these interpretive traps. On one hand,
its marked similarity to various dominant, universally recognized
schools is overlooked, presumably because “Islam” is assumed to be
so dramatically alien to the broader Chinese cultural context that
resemblances are simply ignored. Thus, for instance, its deploy-
ment of literary genres championed by the general Chinese literary
elite has gone unnoticed. On the other hand, however, the Chinese
Muslim intellectual community has not been viewed as different
enough (or, put another way, important enough in its difference)
to be seen as constituting a distinct school of its own. Thus, Chi-
nese Muslim intellectuals have either been understood as having
been subsumed by dominant Han intellectual society and its
schools (through participation in the examination system, for ex-
ample) or been overlooked altogether, viewed as so far outside the
mainstream of eighteenth-century Chinese intellectual trends as
not to warrant investigation.
Chinese Muslim scholarship, however, was not produced in a
vacuum. Specific works and their authors can be properly under-
stood only against the backdrop both of broader Chinese intellec-
tual trends and within the context of their intellectual networks,
educational system, lineage, and pedagogy—that is, within the con-
text of their school. Indeed, Chinese Muslim scholarship is argua-
bly predicated on the existence of such networks. As Randall
Collins contends in The Sociology of Philosophies, “[a significant]
pattern of creativity is intergenerational networks, chains of emi-
nent teachers and pupils.... Creativity is not random among indi-
viduals; it builds up in intergenerational chains.”^14 Chinese Muslim
scholarship, however, has been viewed as just that—random, if not
aberrant. Authors and their texts are understood either as chance,
—————
13. Mayer-Chan, “Historical Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China,”
pp. 36 – 39.
14. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies, pp. 5 – 6.