Efforts to define the concepts “Islam” and “history” have separately engendered rich debates with... more Efforts to define the concepts “Islam” and “history” have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of “Islamic history.” However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects’ self‐ascription as “Muslims” for definitions of “Muslim” and “Islamic” is far more than the empty or “nominal” approach that some critics have described. Rather, Islamic self‐ascription is historically entangled, both an artifact of historical processes and an evocation of them, even an integral element of the phenomenon it seeks to define.
The essay begins with an evaluation of the “islams not Islam” approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words “Islam” and “Muslim.” After proposing a definition of “Islamic history,” one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam.
in Onuma Takehiro, David Brophy, Shinmen Yasushi eds., Xinjiang in the Context of Central Eurasia... more in Onuma Takehiro, David Brophy, Shinmen Yasushi eds., Xinjiang in the Context of Central Eurasian Transformations, 3-25. Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2018.
in Sugawara Jun and Rahile Dawut, eds., Mazar: Studies on Islamic Sacred Sites in Central Eurasia... more in Sugawara Jun and Rahile Dawut, eds., Mazar: Studies on Islamic Sacred Sites in Central Eurasia, eds. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Press, 2016. 275-288.
with David Brophy, in Jeff Eden, The Life of Muhammad Sharif: A Central Asian Sufi Hagiography in Chaghatai. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 55-75.
This article questions dominant understandings of “China,” “Islam,” and the relationship between ... more This article questions dominant understandings of “China,” “Islam,” and the relationship between the two. It does so by uncovering an alternative understanding of China, one held by a group of people living within the Qing Empire and, later, the Republic of China: the Turki-speaking Muslims of Altishahr, known today as Uyghurs. Turki manuscript sources depict China as a distant and distasteful power, as a khanate in the Inner Asian tradition, and as a city synonymous with its ruler, characterized above all else by its rejection of Islam, yet vulnerable to conversion by charismatic Sufis. This notion of China, it is argued, is no more culturally determined than the predominant understanding of China that undergirds most scholarly studies of China, and no less enlightening. And yet Altishahri and other Islamic perspectives have been excluded from our notion of China, largely through a dependence on the concept of “syncretism.” As an alternative to the syncretism approach to cultural interchange, the article advocates for a greater focus on overlapping networks of shared meaning. Applied to the Altishahri case, this approach gives a sense of what is lost in the privileging of Islam and China as dominant categories, and shows the distortions involved in bounding these categories.
This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusin... more This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.
Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical... more Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distinctive about local Uyghur approaches to history has been so little understood as to be missed even in this often-discussed case. This article describes how the local historical appropriation of Afaq's reputation, particularly the recording of narratives about Afaq in writing, began as a typical product of the Naqshbandi maqāmāt tradition, was reshaped into Kashgarian local history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then reshaped again as an ethno-national history beginning in the 1930s, culminating in the publication of the popular historical novel, Apaq Khoja, and its subsequent burning by officials of the People's Republic of China. While the reputation of Afaq in the present certainly reflects the current political context, it also bears significant marks of these earlier traditions through which it has passed. Thus this article argues for an understanding of ‘local history’ as a form of knowledge production that embraces a host of historical approaches, including transnational devotional literature, popular local oasis history and nationalist historical fiction. The author also suggests that these transformations of local history have reflected shifting senses of what is ‘local’ over the last 300 years. The argument is advanced through philological investigation of the manuscript sources, ethnographic fieldwork and literary analysis of the recent novel Apaq Khoja.
This paper analyzes two previously identified coin types which have previously been linked to the... more This paper analyzes two previously identified coin types which have previously been linked to the Yarkand Khanate, but not to any individual rulers, along with a third, previously unreported type with an anepigraphic obverse. It argues that the more common type can be firmly attributed to Abdullah Khan.
Efforts to define the concepts “Islam” and “history” have separately engendered rich debates with... more Efforts to define the concepts “Islam” and “history” have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of “Islamic history.” However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects’ self‐ascription as “Muslims” for definitions of “Muslim” and “Islamic” is far more than the empty or “nominal” approach that some critics have described. Rather, Islamic self‐ascription is historically entangled, both an artifact of historical processes and an evocation of them, even an integral element of the phenomenon it seeks to define.
The essay begins with an evaluation of the “islams not Islam” approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words “Islam” and “Muslim.” After proposing a definition of “Islamic history,” one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam.
in Onuma Takehiro, David Brophy, Shinmen Yasushi eds., Xinjiang in the Context of Central Eurasia... more in Onuma Takehiro, David Brophy, Shinmen Yasushi eds., Xinjiang in the Context of Central Eurasian Transformations, 3-25. Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2018.
in Sugawara Jun and Rahile Dawut, eds., Mazar: Studies on Islamic Sacred Sites in Central Eurasia... more in Sugawara Jun and Rahile Dawut, eds., Mazar: Studies on Islamic Sacred Sites in Central Eurasia, eds. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Press, 2016. 275-288.
with David Brophy, in Jeff Eden, The Life of Muhammad Sharif: A Central Asian Sufi Hagiography in Chaghatai. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 55-75.
This article questions dominant understandings of “China,” “Islam,” and the relationship between ... more This article questions dominant understandings of “China,” “Islam,” and the relationship between the two. It does so by uncovering an alternative understanding of China, one held by a group of people living within the Qing Empire and, later, the Republic of China: the Turki-speaking Muslims of Altishahr, known today as Uyghurs. Turki manuscript sources depict China as a distant and distasteful power, as a khanate in the Inner Asian tradition, and as a city synonymous with its ruler, characterized above all else by its rejection of Islam, yet vulnerable to conversion by charismatic Sufis. This notion of China, it is argued, is no more culturally determined than the predominant understanding of China that undergirds most scholarly studies of China, and no less enlightening. And yet Altishahri and other Islamic perspectives have been excluded from our notion of China, largely through a dependence on the concept of “syncretism.” As an alternative to the syncretism approach to cultural interchange, the article advocates for a greater focus on overlapping networks of shared meaning. Applied to the Altishahri case, this approach gives a sense of what is lost in the privileging of Islam and China as dominant categories, and shows the distortions involved in bounding these categories.
This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusin... more This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group before the construction of the “Uyghur” identity. In the absence of a national history, separate histories of local heroes were linked together through custom anthology production and networked travel to shrines, yielding a modular historical tradition that accommodated local interests in regional narratives. Central to the operation of this system were community authorship in the manuscript tradition, the creation of a new genre for local history, and the publicly recorded circulation of pilgrims who heard performances of historical texts. This constellation of phenomena underpinned an alternative type of imagined community: a reasonably homogeneous, regional, writing-facilitated identity system flourishing in a nonmodern context.
Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical... more Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distinctive about local Uyghur approaches to history has been so little understood as to be missed even in this often-discussed case. This article describes how the local historical appropriation of Afaq's reputation, particularly the recording of narratives about Afaq in writing, began as a typical product of the Naqshbandi maqāmāt tradition, was reshaped into Kashgarian local history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then reshaped again as an ethno-national history beginning in the 1930s, culminating in the publication of the popular historical novel, Apaq Khoja, and its subsequent burning by officials of the People's Republic of China. While the reputation of Afaq in the present certainly reflects the current political context, it also bears significant marks of these earlier traditions through which it has passed. Thus this article argues for an understanding of ‘local history’ as a form of knowledge production that embraces a host of historical approaches, including transnational devotional literature, popular local oasis history and nationalist historical fiction. The author also suggests that these transformations of local history have reflected shifting senses of what is ‘local’ over the last 300 years. The argument is advanced through philological investigation of the manuscript sources, ethnographic fieldwork and literary analysis of the recent novel Apaq Khoja.
This paper analyzes two previously identified coin types which have previously been linked to the... more This paper analyzes two previously identified coin types which have previously been linked to the Yarkand Khanate, but not to any individual rulers, along with a third, previously unreported type with an anepigraphic obverse. It argues that the more common type can be firmly attributed to Abdullah Khan.
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The essay begins with an evaluation of the “islams not Islam” approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words “Islam” and “Muslim.” After proposing a definition of “Islamic history,” one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam.
The essay begins with an evaluation of the “islams not Islam” approach to defining the Islamic, rooting the argument not only in self‐ascription—a common social‐science tool for category definition and boundary making—but also in Islamic historical traditions themselves. It then demonstrates this historical rootedness through an unusually difficult test case: Chinese‐language Islams that eschewed the words “Islam” and “Muslim.” After proposing a definition of “Islamic history,” one that is particularly open and expansive, the article outlines some common characteristics of Islamic history across its many forms, asking what makes it distinct and where it can contribute to a global comparative historiography. Finally, it argues that when we generalize about these traditions, describing the features most widely shared among them, we find an Islamic history that reflects and substantiates the centrality of self‐ascription in delineating the scope of Islam.