How was the past imagined by Hui Muslims in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China? Chen argues that this was a productive time for historical thought, bookended by the establishment of a robust Sino-Islamic knowledge base by Liu Zhi on one end and Republican China on the other end. This book explores histories that unify vast stretches of time and place: from genesis to the modern era, from Arabia to China. Hui historians create narratives that transform China into an Islamic space and Islam into a Chinese religion.

REVIEWS

"J. Lilu Chen makes an important contribution to this body of work with a focused study of the theories of time and history of Muslim authors in eastern China and Yunnan...

Chinese Heirs to Muhammad represents a great expansion of the English- language scholarship on Islamic intellectual life in China and its relation to its social contexts. It should go without saying that Chen’s work will be of great value to scholars of the nineteenth century and the early Republican period. But more than that, given the centrality of time, most of all the distant past but also the future, in how the Islamic world west of China understood East Asian civilization, this work also represents an important contribution to our understanding of the longue durée of interaction between East Asia and the Islamic world."

- Excerpts from Kaveh Hemmat, China Review International, vol. 26