The Chinese Shariah: Islamic Legal Scholarship under the Early Manchu

The early decades of the Qing administration served as a platform for the re-definition of Islamic law in China. Through an intricate process of “intellectual” engineering, Confucian and Islamic principles were eventually reconciled into a consistent pattern of Confucian-Islamic law.

The paper explores the logic in which this phenomenon was crafted under the leadership of Chinese Muslim scholars who successfully identified points of convergence between the two traditions. At the same time, the research analyzes how their efforts to popularize this synthesis set the basis for the ultimate survival, transmission and development of a distinctly Chinese form of Islamic law.