Islam in China

Catalog description

Muslims entered China by the Silk Road shortly after the death of Muhammad in 632 and established permanent communities by the year 1000. Current estimates of the Muslim population in China begin at twenty million and go up. The course will survey the cultural history of the community, showing how it adapted Islamic teachings to a language that had been shaped by three non-theistic traditions Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism and illustrating the manner in which it integrated the distinctive monotheistic features of Islam into the cosmological and humanistic visions of the Chinese traditions.