000 01892nam a22001457a 4500
999 _c514740
_d514740
008 201130b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100 _aBrophy, David.
_921650
245 _a‘He causes a ruckus wherever he goes’: Saʿid Muḥammad al-ʿAsali as a missionary of modernism in north-west China
260 _aModern Asian Studies
300 _a54(4), Jul, 2020: p.1192-1224
520 _aThis article examines the activities of the Syrian hadith scholar Saʿid Muḥammad al-ʿAsali al-Ṭarabulsi al-Shami (1870–1932?), better known as Shami Damulla, as a window onto the relationship between the Ottoman empire and the Muslims of Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkistan. Scholars of Islam in the Soviet Union have identified al-ʿAsali as an influential figure in Soviet Turkistan in the 1920s, but much remains to be clarified about his formative years, and his multiple sojourns in China prior to the Russian Revolution. Here, I seek to fill some of these gaps by tracing al-ʿAsali's connections to modernist and revivalist scholarly circles in India and the Middle East, his activities in Xinjiang, and the strategies he adopted to insert himself into the relationship between the Ottoman court and China. These strategies were both political and intellectual. While moving within Muslim communities across Eurasia, al-ʿAsali also sought to engage the Chinese tradition on its own terms, authoring a 1905 study of Qing institutions entitled The Law of China (Qanun al-Sin)—a rare example of intellectual exchange between late-Ottoman Islamic reformism and the revitalized Confucianism of the late Qing. From a diverse range of sources, a picture emerges of a figure much more complicated, though no less controversial, than can be found in existing characterizations of al-ʿAsali. - Reproduced
773 _aModern Asian Studies
906 _aHEALTH SERVICES - CHINA
942 _cAR