Introduction

Two polar tendencies appear to attract contemporary Chinese Muslim intellectuals as they express their ways of thinking and representations of their Islamic faith in China, tendencies we may loosely identify with ‘Liu Zhi’ and ‘‘Abd al-Wahhab’. We must deal with these as opposite poles of a spectrum. The Liu Zhi tendency includes those who try to talk about a Chinese Muslim culture, even a Chinese Islam, as a syncretic religion, a ‘Neo-Confucian Islam’, a religion inscribed in a historical and cultural context with interpretations adapted to the times. ‘Abd al-Wahhab, on the other hand, represents those who want to know and talk about Islam as a unified transcultural religion, born and defined outside China in the Arabic language, a religion that reflects ahistorical truth, meanings given by God once and for all at the time of the Prophet.

Intellectuals are here understood as those who produce ideas, diffuse them, receive recognition from a public, and act as intermediaries between the public and their ideas. Today's Chinese Muslim intellectual traditions derive from a long historical process, beginning no later than the mid-seventeenth century. The process, which began with Wang Daiyu and was refined by Ma Zhu, Liu Zhi and many others, has continued through the twentieth century, so Liu Zhi and his colleagues continue to inspire Chinese Muslims, especially lay intellectuals. In contrast, the admirers of ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), founder of the reformist scripturalist religious school known as Wahhabiyya, mostly religious professionals or private school teachers, take their inspiration from Chinese Muslim reformists in the first part of the twentieth century, both fundamentalists and modernists, and from outside China, first in political Islam and later in Saudi-inspired Salafism.

The first part of this chapter constitutes an anthropological survey of contemporary Chinese Muslim intellectuals: who are they and how do they act? The second will explain how they arrange themselves along the spectrum between those poles of attraction, from a China-centred tradition to an exogenous Islamic tradition, and how they manage to cooperate and find a middle ground between what appear to be opposite aspirations.

For three decades, and most markedly since 2004, there have been dramatic changes inside China concerning the definition of the intellectual, one who is allowed or able to produce intellectual discourse.