Speaker: Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer in East Asian History, the University of Manchester
For more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland. Yet the Muslims of China have often been understood as inherently foreign, incompatible with Chinese culture. In this reappraisal, Rian Thum recaptures the ordinariness of Chinese Muslims. In doing so, he suggests that these communities, whose classification has so often been seen as problematic, can teach us about the ways social categories are made and maintained in the first place.
Rian Thum is Senior Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.
This program is presented by The Language of Islam, a Kaplan Institute research workshop, and cosponsored by the East Asian Research Forum; the South Asian Research Forum; the Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies Research Program; the Middle East and North African Studies Program; the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures; the Department of Religious Studies; and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies.
Alexander Barna
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