The Han Kitab Authors 161
tached, with varying degrees of intimacy, to the educational net-
work.
The creation of Chinese Muslim scholarship was a process that
was striking for its interactive and cooperative nature. Despite the
transregional spread of Muslim communities throughout China,
scholars involved in this project were not isolated from one an-
other, nor were they isolated from their non-Muslim intellectual
surroundings. There is no text contained within the Han Kitab that
does not enter into direct dialogue with other texts and their au-
thors; nor is there one that was published without some sort of le-
gitimation or support (in the form of a preface or postface, greet-
ings, or editorship) from the broader Chinese Muslim literati
community. Most significant, every Chinese Muslim work of
scholarship produced during the educational network’s period of
consolidation aims to be an expansion and continuation of a
specifically Muslim Chinese body of knowledge, of the “Dao” of
Islam.
The interconnectedness of Chinese Muslim scholarship took
place on two levels: the physical and the intellectual. In both cases,
the educational system was the instrument of consolidation. On
the most immediate level, the schools and mosques that housed
scholars and their students were the physical sites that first made
scholarly interaction possible, and that ultimately resulted in its be-
ing one of the most essential features of Chinese Muslim intellec-
tual life. The physical interaction afforded by these sites was meta-
phorically replicated in the purely intellectual realm, as well. Thus,
just as learning took place through dialogue and personal interac-
tion, scholarship was produced through the “dialogue” of a shared
textual tradition. The ways in which scholars wrote in consort
with one another and the ways in which they were enabled and
supported by the Chinese Muslim literati constituency were both
products of and a mirroring of the educational system itself. Fi-
nally, such interaction—both physical and intellectual—became a
crucial manifestation of Chinese Muslim identity as that identity
was understood and propagated by Chinese Muslim intellectuals.
Lan Zixi’s Tianfang zhengxue ( 1852 ) is the third significant textual
moment in the process of an emerging scholarly collective that be-