ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of the Chinese-speaking Muslims – people now called Huizu in the People’s Republic of China – and the conceptual schemes that have been used to identify and define them, chiefly “religion” and “ethnicity” (Ch. minzu). It asks how people can simultaneously belong to two powerful, sometimes exclusive, identity categories and how particular contexts – geographical and temporal – affect their solutions to this problem. It explores Sino-Muslims’ relations with Chinese political authority and, more distantly, with the transnational congregation (Ar. umma) of Islam.
