A flexible choice of comrades: the dynamic identity of the Muslim Huis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

This paper investigates how Hui scholars imagined the membership of their community during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as sharing communal religious duties, such as Islamic education and funeral rites, which were correctively imposed by an Islamic doctrine on all Muslims. The analysis is mainly based on two texts. One is an inscriptive text drafted in Arabic and Persian by Ma Minglong in A.H. 1079 (1668–1669) and inscribed by his son in 1673 in Wuchang, Hubei province. The other is Tianfang dianli (Commentary on Rites of Islam), written in Chinese by Liu Zhi (d. after 1724) based on Arabic and Persian Islamic books. The analysis shows that these Hui scholars have flexibly demarcated their communities from those whom they regarded as “other” Muslims, depending on various situations. Additionally, this paper illuminates how Hui scholars’ various and flexible delineations of “us” facilitated their negotiations for advantageous positions toward Muslim rivals, as well as non-Muslims who suspected their orthodoxy. This relativizes the argument that Hui scholars understood themselves as being simultaneously Chinese and Muslim when they situated themselves vis-à-vis Chinese literati—an argument that has been often repeated in the study of Hui Muslims.