In the early twentieth century, as the multiethnic Qing empire transformed into the Republican Chinese nation-state, Chinese Muslims faced new challenges, confronting competing visions of nation-building, religion, secularism, democracy, and modernity. In this book, Hale Erolu explores how a group of key figures navigated this complex landscape, offering a transnational intellectual history of Chinese Muslim thought.
Muslim Transnationalism in Modern China provides a portrait of underrecognized reformists who aimed to turn Muslim subjects into active Chinese citizens and revive true Islam in order to aid Chinas development and promote peace. Erolu examines reformists engagement with local and transnational Muslim currents, spanning orthodox, heterodox, reformist, secular, and socialist movements from Egypt, Britain, India, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. She reveals their varied strategies and highlights how they adapted global ideas to address local challenges such as the policies of the Nationalist and Communist parties, the antireligion discourse of the New Culture Movement, and the anti-Islam rhetoric of Christian missionaries. Drawing from Republican and early Communist-era journals, Chinese translations of Islamic sources, and memoirs and travelogues, this book offers a nuanced understanding of Chinese-speaking Muslim intellectuals efforts to balance local and global influences in shaping their communitys future.