124 The Han Kitab Authors
isolated cases or as the rare example of “successful” assimilation
into dominant, non-Muslim intellectual structures.^15
Elman observes that in the Qing, “school divisions were taken
for granted as evidence of the filiation of scholars, who through
personal or geographical association, philosophic or literary
agreement, or master-disciple relations could be classed as distinct
‘schools of learning’ (chia-hsueh.”^16 He is correct to alert us to this
somewhat misleading assumption, for the case of the Chinese Mus-
lim educational network suggests that the reverse is the case—that
is, such factors as geographical association, master-disciple relations,
and the like should themselves be taken as evidence of the exis-
tence of something perhaps best termed a “school.” Rather than
seeing a division into schools as evidence for such factors, we
should understand these factors as the very basis for school divi-
sions themselves.
The case of the Chinese Muslim school is, on one hand, charac-
teristic of other schools of the period. The shared body of litera-
ture used across a wide area, the master-disciple relations between
various members, kin relations between others, their geographic
interconnectedness, and the like are typical of schools in the early
to mid-Qing. On the other hand, however, the Chinese Muslim
school is distinctive in the total clarity of its ideological or phi-
losophic basis for the filiation of scholars. The factor (however
protean and difficult to define in purely intellectual terms) that ties
the school’s members together is not simply philosophic or liter-
ary agreement but the amorphous notion of “Islam.”
In the Chinese context, this denotes not only “faith” or “relig-
ion” but also a specific space to which Muslims in China looked as
a place of origin and a specific history from which they derived
their identity. Islam was the starting point in the genealogical
time/space continuum created by family and pedagogic genealogies.
The way in which Islam is manifest in, or is a contributing factor
to the formation of, this school is therefore not strictly religious,
in the narrowest sense of that term. Instead, Islam was itself con-
—————
15. In addition to Christian missionary evaluations of Han Kitab works, see
also Tazaka, Chūgoku ni okeru Kaikyō; and Israeli, Muslims in China.
16. Elman, Classicism, Politics, and Kinship, p. 2.