Rian Thum
Biographic Data
| ID | 1245724 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rian Thum |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rian |
| FAMILY NAME | Thum |
| SIGNATURE | THUM R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Akademia Ignatianum w Krakowie |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Islamic China
A deeply learned reassessment of the history of Chinese Muslims, who since the fourteenth century have been subject to a constant program of minoritization. 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 inheren…
The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya in China
The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya order is among the world's largest and most geographically widespread Sufi orders, but it has long been assumed to be absent among Chinese-speaking Muslims. Despite a handful of isolated references to local Chinese Mujaddidī groups in studies of particular communities, comprehensive histories of Chinese Islams make no mention of the Mujaddidiyya, and histories of the Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya make no reference to C…
Continuity and Change at Millennial Scale
This essay offers an experiment in chronological boundary crossing as way of addressing questions about continuity and change in Central Eurasia. It analyzes the violent transformations of holy sites in Altishahr (more widely known as Eastern Turkistan or southern Xinjiang), examining the 11th-century transition from Buddhist to Muslim rule alongside the 21st-century efforts of the People’s Republic of China to transform sacred Islamic sites into…
The Xinjiang Emergency
As evidence of the Chinese state's atrocities against non-Han peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region accumulated during 2017–19, scholars specializing in the region published numerous essays in nonacademic publications, describing and interpreting state policies for a broad public. With the appearance of two edited volumes this year (the other is Byler et al.'s Xinjiang Year Zero [2022]),1 the body of scholarly work, much of it by those…
"Sunni" Veneration of the Twelve Imams in Khotan
Over a century ago European explorers in Eastern Turkestan (southern Xinjiang) made a remarkable discovery: the Sunni inhabitants of Khotan were engaged in elaborate veneration of the Shiʿi twelve Imams, whom they believed to be buried at various holy sites in the Khotan region. This paper investigates Khotan's net work of holy sites and the narratives that were attached to them, from the sixteenth century to the present. While the political land…
The Turkistanis of Mecca
This article presents a case study of one family’s exile from the Tarim Basin, where the relatives they left behind are now known as ‘Uyghurs,’ to the Mecca region, where the exiles regard themselves as ‘Turkistanis.’ This case is then examined in the context of other exilic families’ oral histories and narrative strategies to show an ongoing process of Turkistani identity formation and history production that seeks to accommodate personal and co…
The Spatial Cleansing of Xinjiang
ometime between 10 and 17 March 2018, on a high sand dune 75 kilometres from the town of Niya, a beloved historical monument disappeared (Kuo 2019). For at least 450 years the site had drawn pilgrims from across the expanse of Altishahr, the southern half of what is now known variously as Eastern Turkistan or Xinjiang (Dghlt 1996(Dghlt [1543], 190)], 190). Pilgrims came to be in the presence of Imam Je'firi Sadiq-a founding father and hero who ha…
What Is Islamic History
Efforts to define the concepts "Islam" and "history" have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of "Islamic history." However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects' self-ascription as "Muslim…
The Rise of Xinjiang Studies
Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and…
Surviving in a “Society”-centric World
While this essay will speak primarily from a historian's perspective, I want first to acknowledge that the idea of “societies” has had a peculiarly interdisciplinary hold on scholarship, bridging the humanities and social sciences. For sociologists it is a disciplinary foundation, for anthropologists it is often an escape hatch from the problematic notion of “cultures,” and for historians it is an organizational scheme that has stealthily metamor…
Studies on Sufism in Central Asia By Devin Deweese
Journal Article Studies on Sufism in Central Asia By Devin DeWeese Get access Studies on Sufism in Central Asia By Devin DeWeese (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), xviii + 354 pp. Price HB £90.00. EAN 978–1409443926. Rian Thum Rian Thum Department of History, Loyola University New Orleans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 26, Issue 2, May 2015, Pages 241–243, https://doi.org…
The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
For 250 years the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr, who now call themselves Uyghurs, have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s national narrative. The roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, Rian Thum says, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage along the Silk Road dominated understandings of the past
Beyond resistance and nationalism
Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distin…
Modular History
This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group be…
The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
For 250 years the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr, who now call themselves Uyghurs, have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s national narrative. The roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, Rian Thum says, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage along the Silk Road dominated understandings of the past
The Spatial Cleansing of Xinjiang
ometime between 10 and 17 March 2018, on a high sand dune 75 kilometres from the town of Niya, a beloved historical monument disappeared (Kuo 2019). For at least 450 years the site had drawn pilgrims from across the expanse of Altishahr, the southern half of what is now known variously as Eastern Turkistan or Xinjiang (Dghlt 1996(Dghlt [1543], 190)], 190). Pilgrims came to be in the presence of Imam Je'firi Sadiq-a founding father and hero who ha…
What Is Islamic History
Efforts to define the concepts "Islam" and "history" have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of "Islamic history." However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects' self-ascription as "Muslim…
Modular History
This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group be…
The Turkistanis of Mecca
This article presents a case study of one family’s exile from the Tarim Basin, where the relatives they left behind are now known as ‘Uyghurs,’ to the Mecca region, where the exiles regard themselves as ‘Turkistanis.’ This case is then examined in the context of other exilic families’ oral histories and narrative strategies to show an ongoing process of Turkistani identity formation and history production that seeks to accommodate personal and co…
The Rise of Xinjiang Studies
Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and…
Surviving in a “Society”-centric World
While this essay will speak primarily from a historian's perspective, I want first to acknowledge that the idea of “societies” has had a peculiarly interdisciplinary hold on scholarship, bridging the humanities and social sciences. For sociologists it is a disciplinary foundation, for anthropologists it is often an escape hatch from the problematic notion of “cultures,” and for historians it is an organizational scheme that has stealthily metamor…
Beyond resistance and nationalism
Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distin…
Beyond resistance and nationalism
Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distin…
Modular History
This paper investigates how a regional identity can be maintained in a nonmodern context, focusing on the case of southern Xinjiang in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument focuses on one aspect of this identity system, the popular historical tradition, arguing that its deployment through both manuscript technology and regional shrine pilgrimage contributed to the maintenance of Xinjiang's settled Turki identity group be…
The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
For 250 years the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr, who now call themselves Uyghurs, have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s national narrative. The roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, Rian Thum says, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage along the Silk Road dominated understandings of the past
Studies on Sufism in Central Asia By Devin Deweese
Journal Article Studies on Sufism in Central Asia By Devin DeWeese Get access Studies on Sufism in Central Asia By Devin DeWeese (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), xviii + 354 pp. Price HB £90.00. EAN 978–1409443926. Rian Thum Rian Thum Department of History, Loyola University New Orleans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 26, Issue 2, May 2015, Pages 241–243, https://doi.org…
Surviving in a “Society”-centric World
While this essay will speak primarily from a historian's perspective, I want first to acknowledge that the idea of “societies” has had a peculiarly interdisciplinary hold on scholarship, bridging the humanities and social sciences. For sociologists it is a disciplinary foundation, for anthropologists it is often an escape hatch from the problematic notion of “cultures,” and for historians it is an organizational scheme that has stealthily metamor…
The Rise of Xinjiang Studies
Perhaps no area of China-related scholarship has taken longer to recover from the access limitations of the mid-twentieth century than the study of Xinjiang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of Xinjiang was so fashionable that it had a wide following in the Western popular press, where the region was better known as Chinese Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, or Eastern Turkistan. When the turmoil of the Republican and…
What Is Islamic History
Efforts to define the concepts "Islam" and "history" have separately engendered rich debates with long intellectual genealogies. Both debates serve as a foundation for this essay's attempt to delimit the subject of "Islamic history." However, the essay also argues that a close examination of the interaction between the two categories offers its own insights. Chief among these is the argument that a reliance on subjects' self-ascription as "Muslim…
The Spatial Cleansing of Xinjiang
ometime between 10 and 17 March 2018, on a high sand dune 75 kilometres from the town of Niya, a beloved historical monument disappeared (Kuo 2019). For at least 450 years the site had drawn pilgrims from across the expanse of Altishahr, the southern half of what is now known variously as Eastern Turkistan or Xinjiang (Dghlt 1996(Dghlt [1543], 190)], 190). Pilgrims came to be in the presence of Imam Je'firi Sadiq-a founding father and hero who ha…
The Turkistanis of Mecca
This article presents a case study of one family’s exile from the Tarim Basin, where the relatives they left behind are now known as ‘Uyghurs,’ to the Mecca region, where the exiles regard themselves as ‘Turkistanis.’ This case is then examined in the context of other exilic families’ oral histories and narrative strategies to show an ongoing process of Turkistani identity formation and history production that seeks to accommodate personal and co…
"Sunni" Veneration of the Twelve Imams in Khotan
Over a century ago European explorers in Eastern Turkestan (southern Xinjiang) made a remarkable discovery: the Sunni inhabitants of Khotan were engaged in elaborate veneration of the Shiʿi twelve Imams, whom they believed to be buried at various holy sites in the Khotan region. This paper investigates Khotan's net work of holy sites and the narratives that were attached to them, from the sixteenth century to the present. While the political land…
Continuity and Change at Millennial Scale
This essay offers an experiment in chronological boundary crossing as way of addressing questions about continuity and change in Central Eurasia. It analyzes the violent transformations of holy sites in Altishahr (more widely known as Eastern Turkistan or southern Xinjiang), examining the 11th-century transition from Buddhist to Muslim rule alongside the 21st-century efforts of the People’s Republic of China to transform sacred Islamic sites into…
The Xinjiang Emergency
As evidence of the Chinese state's atrocities against non-Han peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region accumulated during 2017–19, scholars specializing in the region published numerous essays in nonacademic publications, describing and interpreting state policies for a broad public. With the appearance of two edited volumes this year (the other is Byler et al.'s Xinjiang Year Zero [2022]),1 the body of scholarly work, much of it by those…
The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya in China
The Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya order is among the world's largest and most geographically widespread Sufi orders, but it has long been assumed to be absent among Chinese-speaking Muslims. Despite a handful of isolated references to local Chinese Mujaddidī groups in studies of particular communities, comprehensive histories of Chinese Islams make no mention of the Mujaddidiyya, and histories of the Naqshbandiyya Mujaddidiyya make no reference to C…
Islamic China
A deeply learned reassessment of the history of Chinese Muslims, who since the fourteenth century have been subject to a constant program of minoritization. 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 inheren…
History (10 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations (9 works) · History (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Ancient history (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Narrative (6 works)