ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how Chinese Muslim intellectuals used Wells’ The Outline of History alongside orientalist scholarship in the efforts to demonstrate that the communities constituted an integral and historic part of the Chinese nation and that the West had inherited science and reason from Islamic civilization. The casting Wells as an Islamophobe, Chinese Muslim intellectuals created the enemy they needed to mobilize the communities and legitimize the own authority to represent Islam in China. That something similar, a mirror “corporate institution” conditions subaltern engagement with orientalism. Like orientalism, system is complex, the product of internal politics as well as a broader encounter between Western and non-Western representations of the East. Each image had its own use: Wells the Islamophobe made for a compelling enemy against whom Chinese Muslim elites could mobilize the constituents; Wells the Islamophile lent an authoritative name to Chinese Muslim claims that Islam was a rational religion that deserved a place in modern China.
