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A book release conversation with Rian Thum

For more than a millennium, Islam has been a Chinese religion, and native-born Chinese Muslims have played important roles in their homeland—as butchers, merchants, and farmers; diplomats, scholar-officials, and royal astronomers. Yet the Muslims of China have often been understood as inherently foreign, incompatible with Chinese culture.

In his new book, Rian Thum recaptures the ordinariness of Chinese Muslims and offers a fresh view of Islamic China, stretching across Central, Southeast, and South Asia—and of China itself. For this event, Thum discusses with book with David Stroup, an expert on Chinese Muslims at the University of Manchester.

About the speaker

Rian Thum is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Manchester. A contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation, he is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History, winner of the Fairbank Prize for East Asian History from the American Historical Association and the Hsu Prize for East Asian Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association.

Photography

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Joint event presented by Manchester China Institute

The Manchester China Institute (MCI) promotes excellence in China studies at the University of Manchester. MCI hosts in-person talks, workshops, and roundtables, and well as webinars with a global reach. Our public events are free and open to all. The University of Manchester is committed to academic independence and the freedom of speech. The views speakers present are entirely their own, and do not represent those of the University of Manchester or the Manchester China Institute and its directors.