158 The Han Kitab Authors
exactly, were these past scholars? The works listed in Yuan’s bibli-
ography today are considered central components of the Han Kitab,
and their authors oftentimes served also as teachers, figures who
were the finest products of the Chinese Islamic educational net-
work and its constituency.
With the gradual rise of authorship as a category distinct from
but often overlapping that of pedagogy, these scholars became in
and of themselves evidence for, and validation of the success of, the
Chinese Muslim educational system. Moreover, they represent the
interface between textuality and orality in the Chinese Muslim in-
tellectual tradition. As teachers, their role was to preserve, codify,
and transmit the body of written knowledge from the past; as
scholars, their role was to compose works that were in turn to be-
come important components of that very same body of knowledge.
This twofold process of transmission of and contribution to a
growing quasi-canonical body of work is one seen most clearly in
Zhao’s Genealogy. The authors codified by Yuan were the definers,
preservers, and transmitters of Chinese Islamic knowledge; they
were also its producers. Thus works such as Zhao’s and Yuan’s
both documented and expanded the body of knowledge deemed
important to the Chinese Muslim intellectual community. This
twofold process testified to the gradual consolidation of a Chinese
Muslim scholarly identity and was bound up with the Islamic edu-
cational network. Finally, through its awareness of and participa-
tion in broader intellectual trends in Chinese society—the Siku
quanshu project, for example, in the case of Yuan—the Islamic edu-
cational system as a whole was (to the mind of Chinese Muslim in-
tellectuals, at least) brought under the umbrella of general Chinese
literati society.
Apparently, Yuan considered the texts he was listing as a quasi-
canonical whole, a corpus of knowledge produced by earlier gen-
erations of scholars. These scholars shared the same intellectual
background and interests; Yuan considered himself to be one of
the latest links in the chain of transmission of knowledge produced
by them. Further, Yuan Guozuo was the great-grandson of Yuan
Shengzhi, founder of the Yuan family Islamic school in Nanjing.
He was the grandson of Yuan Ruqi, an important teacher in the