‘He Causes a Ruckus Wherever He Goes’: Saʿid Muḥammad al-ʿAsali as a Missionary of Modernism in North-West China

Abstract

This article examines the activities of the Syrian hadith scholar Saʿid Muḥammad al-ʿAsali al-Ṭarabulsi al-Shami (1870–1932?), better known as Shami Damulla, as a window onto the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Muslims of Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkistan. Scholars of Islam in the Soviet Union have identified al-ʿAsali as an influential figure in Soviet Turkistan in the 1920s, but much remains to be clarified about his formative years, and his multiple sojourns in China prior to the Russian Revolution. Here I seek to fill some of these gaps by tracing al-ʿAsali’s connections to modernist and revivalist scholarly circles in India and the Middle East, his activities in Xinjiang, and the strategies he adopted to insert himself into the relationship between the Ottoman court and China. These strategies were both political and intellectual. While moving within Muslim communities across Eurasia, al-ʿAsali also sought to engage the Chinese tradition on its own terms, authoring a 1905 study of Qing institutions entitled The Law of China (Qanun al-Sin), a rare example of intellectual exchange between late-Ottoman Islamic reformism, and the revitalised Confucianism of the late-Qing. From a diverse range of sources a picture emerges of a figure much more complicated, though no less controversial, than can be found in existing characterisations of al-ʿAsali.