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The Joseph Fletcher Memorial Lecture
Sponsored by the Joseph F. Fletcher Jr. Fund for Inner Asian Studies

Reflections on the Fletcher Legacy*

Françoise Aubin
Director emerita of research, CNRS, Paris

It is a great honor for me to have the opportunity to celebrate Joseph Fletcher’s work, which I so much admire, and to do so before such a distinguished audience.  I confess that when reading Joe Fletcher’s articles, I have a feeling similar to that of a nineteenth-century reader of the verse of the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch, who would recognize every beautiful image, every bold thought, so much had they become part of the common heritage of poetry.  In the same way, Joe Fletcher’s proposed theories and ideas have become so quickly integrated into his fields of research that they now seem self-evident.  And Fletcher, like Petrarch, has been a bridge between two epochs and an initiator of new ways of thinking.

By a curious coincidence, during these last few months I have had the touching duty of relating the life and career of three other prominent Asianists apart from Joseph Fletcher.  The first was Etienne Balazs, a Sinologist whose seminars I attended for many years.  Hungarian by birth and French by a late-acquired nationality, he died at the relatively early age of 58, sixty-three years ago, after a life of awful difficulties.  The centenary of his birth was celebrated at the end of last year by a small colloquium in Paris, whose proceedings are currently being published.  He may be honored, among other things, for having helped establish Sinology as an autonomous discipline, independent of Inner Asian and Sanskrit philology, and having integrated it into a general frame of sociological reflections.  The second personality was the German Mongolist, Walther Heissig, who died last year at the age of ninety-one.  Among other things, for his part, he emancipated Mongolian studies from the tutelage of Chinese studies.  The third scholar was Jean Aubin, an Iranist who also specialized in the Ottoman Empire and Renaissance Portugal.  He was handicapped from early youth by an acute heart complaint, which explains why his major life’s work,  a history of the reign of D. Manuel of Portugal and of the Portuguese discovery of India at the turn of the sixteenth century, has only just been published, eight years after his death.

Due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, Joseph Fletcher is the only one of these four scholars whom I never met.  Therefore I must try to imagine his personality.  He is praised for his generosity and kindness.  His reviews, even if critical, are always extremely polite, of the type:  “I find myself in serious disagreement with many points in the book, but these objections do not substantially detract from its value.”  I also have personal proof of his kindness, in the last message I received from him, dated 24 September 1983, just ten months before his untimely death at the age of almost fifty.  At that time, I had already been handicapped for nine years.  I was very moved when he wrote, as if his illness was not more tragic than mine, “I, too, know what it means to be incapacitated.  I was diagnosed as having cancer last autumn, and had two surgical operations.”  To transmit his message, he chose a Japanese card printed with a symbol of quietness and reassurance - a peaceful Kannon/Guanyin of the Tempy? era (mid-eighth century).  With the passage of time, the remainder of his letter is very poignant:  “And now [I] must stay quiet (and write up my work as fast as possible)”.  One year earlier, before his illness was diagnosed, he wrote:  “I decided not to attend the Congress of Mongolists in Ulan Bator this year because I have spent too many years promiscuously gathering new ideas and information and not enough time writing.  Now I am trying to overbalance life in the other direction” (letter dated August 30, 1982).

That is the drama of his life, as well as its miracle.  Although his oeuvre is limited in size and does not even include a book, it has left an indelible mark on Asian studies.  The curious thing is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are devoted to the printed book.  In France it is believed that a young researcher cannot make a decent career if he has not published a book, and we are convinced that this fashion came a long time ago precisely from Harvard.  So Joe Fletcher’s case is a counter-argument:  that success can come without a book.

I.  The method (back to top)

What is the secret of Joe Fletcher’s articles?

First, a fantastic knowledge of sources.  Not a skimpy use of some original texts, just to look good in a brilliant final bibliography, but a deep familiarity with all the available evidence.  That is, on the one hand, he looked with a new eye at sources that were already known; and on the other hand, he displayed a keen philological approach for interpreting history.  These very processes are precisely the basis of the fame of the three late scholars I have talked about.  A joy of listening at Balazs’ teaching was the way he could extract from a dull and difficult Song source a whole range of innuendoes.  W. Heissig toiled till the end to publish and to comment on a vast array of Mongolian literary and religious texts, many of which were previously unknown.  J. Aubin used to say that he liked to squeeze the juice out of his sources as if he were squeezing a lemon, and his pleasure was to read over and over again these sources until he discovered a new clue or implication that neither he nor anyone before him had noticed previously (nor anybody before him), which would force him to destroy and write afresh the pages he had already painfully composed.  This explains why he left so many unfinished papers, and I wonder whether Joe Fletcher was not subject to the same qualms of conscience about the exhaustive exploitation of his sources.

It is known that Joe Fletcher tried as much as possible to collaborate with native scholars to ascertain the exact meaning of his sources.  This was a modest attitude which must be encouraged among young scholars, along with the full mastery of the native literature on a given subject.  But this recommendation should be accompanied with an important warning to beginners:  let them be very cautious about simply accepting native historical interpretations.  It goes without saying that showing respect to native scholars’ opinions is a sound standpoint in our post-colonial era.  However, we cannot forget an excellent saying popular among the intelligentsia of the Soviet Union during the Communist times:  “Nobody in the future knows what the past will be.”  The re-writing of the past in China, Mongolia, Central Asia is certainly a fascinating topic for discussion.  But native speculations about the national (or the supposed national) past should always be checked first against original sources, and secondly against various non-native literatures on the subject.

Joe Fletcher’s other solid merit lay in the variety of languages – classical and modern, Eastern and Western (including modern Greek) – he mastered.  In France, I have noticed that advanced students and young scholars in our fields, having spent long sojourns in the country (or the countries) they study, know perfectly well its (or their) spoken language(s).  They have obviously enjoyed possibilities which were never open in Joe Fletcher’s youth.  Unfortunately, they very often confine themselves to this sole ability.  I argue, for example, against them quoting Sino-Muslim literary texts of the eighteenth century according to their modern versions in baihua.  In doing so they by-pass the huge problem of reinterpretation inherent in any translation, even within a given language from the written classical one to the spoken modern one.  Conversely, an interesting topic would be to bring to light the way terms and expressions of the classical Sino-Muslim works, and of the Koran, are now used in accordance with Chinese official ideology.

Not knowing what has been written by Western scholars about a given subject is offending, too, not least because such ignorance deprives one of the opportunity to weigh the pros and cons of native opinions in order to not blindly endorse an imaginative reconstruction of an alleged past.  It is puzzling that it is still necessary to demonstrate – at least in popular publications – what Fletcher showed for a fact in 1968, namely that (despite the creed of faith of the People’s Republic of China) present-day Uyghurs cannot trace back their descent to the medieval Uyghurs.  The very name of “Uyghur” was revived at a meeting held in the Soviet Union in 1921.  The idea that the inhabitants of the southwestern cities of Eastern Turkestan (or Xinjiang) and those of the northern part of the present province “were one and the same nationality – let alone that they were all Uighurs – is an innovation stemming largely from the needs of twentieth-century nationalism,” and let us add, of complying with the sacrosanct theory of the fifty-six minzu (“nationalities”) constituting the People’s Republic of China.  Happily, this thorny question has been aptly retold recently, on the basis of Uyghur writings of the twenties, by David Brophy, a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Inner Asian and Altaic Studies program.  It is just the same in Mongolia where now, in the full swing of post-communism, the Xiongnu are believed to be the direct ancestors of the present-day Mongols and their customs and habits are said to have passed intact up to the present day.

The neglect of previous developments in a given field of research may come from a lack of curiosity.  It may come too, unhappily, from ignorance of foreign languages.  Some time ago, meeting Klaus Sagaster, the Tibetologist and Mongolist from Bonn, and the successor (now retired) of Walther Heissig, I asked him what message he would like me to transmit on the occasion of my planned lecture here.  Without hesitation, he replied:  “Only one thing.  Tell the young people to study main European languages, at least French, German, Russian.  A spoken ability is not necessary, only a reading one.”  By the way I remark that Fletcher, despite his fantastic gift for languages, wrote to me in English.  But in the rich bibliography of his “Integrative History” (Studies, X), he quotes a French book of local history (p. 11, n. 20), which even French scholars have difficulty finding in libraries, and he mentions a Hungarian book written by the Marxist historian and literary critic Tökei Ferenc (p. 5, n. 3). 

The argument that, owing to globalization, everybody in the world is now supposed to read and write in English is an illusion and is untenable.  First, languages with a long cultural past continue to live and to be worth studying for themselves.  Secondly, non-English speaking European scholars cannot avoid writing in their own language to reach their national readership, and also they prefer expressing their ideas in their own language.  Thirdly, only a small part of the relevant European scholarship from the recent or more distant past has been translated into English.

I am sure that for a student who masters languages as difficult as Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Turkish, Persian or Arabic, it is child’s play to acquire a hint of the main European languages and then take the trouble to look at European publications.  If he does not read French, he is cut off from the glorious tradition of Chavannes and Pelliot.  If he does not know German, he will miss the inexhaustible stream of publications of our colleagues writing wholly or partly in their own language, beginning with Erich Haenisch, Gerhard Doerfer, and Herbert Franke.  For Russian, suffice it to mention the names of the great Vasilii Vasil’evich Radlov (Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff) and Vasilii Vladimirovich Bartol’d.  This is not even to mention Hungarian, despite the importance of the schools founded by Julius Nemeth (Németh Gyula, who published in German too), L. Fekete (Fekete Lajos, also publishing in German), and Louis Ligeti (Ligeti Lajos, a French-language devotee); or of Italian, which is illustrated in our field by Giuseppe Tucci and Luciano Petech; or of Swedish, in which language Gunnar Jarring wrote articles that still remain untranslated.  I wish in addition to strongly recommend Japanese, which is necessary not only for Chinese studies, as everybody knows, but for Mongolian and Central Asian ethnographic research and historical sources, as well.

How frustrating for a reviewer to notice that an idea painfully defended by an English-speaking author has long since been exposed by another, non-English-speaking, author, or that, on the contrary, it is obsolete in the light of what has been published in Europe.  Two striking examples spring to mind.  The first pertains to the field of shamanism.  Since its publication in 1990, the standard work on this subject should be La chasse à l’âme (“The Hunt for the soul”) by Roberte Hamayon and her several related articles.  But her refutation of the too-widely accepted understanding of shamanism as a psycho-pathological phenomenon, and of ecstatic trance as the means of communication with the spirits, was too revolutionary and innovative to be easily accepted, all the more so since the size of the book is forbidding (almost 900 pages).  The result is that seldom quoted is her distinct presentation of the shamanism of hunters in Siberian forests as a relationship with the souls of the game on an flexible and horizontal level of exchanges, including alliance and marriage; her explanation of the shamanism of cattle-breeders in the steppe as a relationship with the souls of ancestors on a vertical and hierarchical ladder, using sacrifices of animals as tools of action; or, finally, her interpretation of modern shamanism as a way of healing and of managing uncertainty.

The other example, also from the circle of R. Hamayon, concerns the refutation of another well-worn idea:  that the Chinggisid Mongols of the thirteenth century observed the cult of a supreme deity named “Eternal Blue Heaven” (köke möngke tengri, or xöx mönx tenger in modern Mongolian), which cult is still perpetuated in so-called tengri-worship, “Tengrism.”  Thirteen years ago, Marie-Lise Beffa showed conclusively the incorrectness of such a view.  Actually, the qualification of “blue” applied to the sky/heaven was a medieval Turk belief, not a Mongolian one.  Chinggis Khan’s enthronement in 1206 was a completely human act, not a divine one, and his recourse to the protection and will of the enduring Sky was the validation of his previous successes, not their cause.  After all, no cult was rendered to this entity (useful mainly in diplomatic letters) and, unlike ancestors, banners, and mountains, it never received any sacrifice, nor did it play any role in the administration of justice or the guarantee of oaths.

A third strength of Joe Fletcher’s was his way of presenting material.  Those who have toiled to produce an encyclopedia article within a limited number of words, lines, or pages, are in a position to appreciate his skill in skimming through broad historical questions in clear and neat prose that fit a broad readership and yet accurately met the needs of the specialist.  Even in the most concise text, he was nevertheless able to introduce here and there the fine details that bring something new to the connoisseur.  For example, in his commentary to the Photographs of the Wulsin Expedition to Northwest China in 1923, he makes interesting remarks about the Tibetan monastery of Labrang in western China.  His reviews are models of brevity and clarity.  His paper on “China and Central Asia, 1368-1884” (Studies, II, 1968) is typical of the way he writes and a model in itself:  the text summarizes more than five centuries in only eighteen pages, but the bibliography and the notes, packed into thirty pages in small print, are a mine of first-hand information.

The reader of his papers is always gratified by a pleasant style.  I noted the following sentence as particularly vivid:  “The Safavids may have ridden to power on the backs of the Turkmens’ horses, but by the second half of the sixteenth century the Turkmen is the Safavid stable boy.”  Here the reader cannot help remembering the famous motto dating back to the Western Han (at the turn of the second century B.C.):  “Even though an empire may be conquered on horseback, it cannot be administered on horseback,” which Yelü Chucai (1189-1285) taught to the successor of Chinggis Khan, Ögödei (r. 1229-1241), and Liu Bingzhong (1216-1274) to the future emperor Qubilai (r. 1260-1294).  In commenting on the Safavids, Joe Fletcher certainly had this celebrated dictum in mind, and the transfer of Chinese wisdom to Persia could well be a subtle mark of his humor.  His humor has often a poetic inspiration, as seen in his idea of a “plane ride” for discovering the interconnections and parallels of events all over the world, or in his imagery of the early modern world looking like a needlepoint in bright colors:  “The subtle translucent hues of the warp and the dazzling colors and patterns of the needlepoint yarn almost totally conceal the horizontal continuities of the weft.  But without the weft we have no needlepoint at all.  Only a bag of threads.”

But Fletcher did not write for the simple pleasure of recounting a nice story, nor did he advance erudite remarks simply to make a show of his learning.  No!  He always had something to demonstrate, either a particular issue for a culturally or geographically limited field, or, more often, something concerning broad comparative questions.  As he had a strong sense of synthesis, he delivered his message lightly, without overloading it with the technical jargon now so fashionable.  It strikes me as odd that young English-speaking scholars, who are reluctant to quote French “Orientalist” scholarship, are so fond of the theories of French (or French-writing) philosophers, which are so prone to lengthy, jargon-filled exposition.  Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a denouncer of persecution carried on in the name of society; the post-structuralist and post-modernist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), a defender of the symbolic and the imaginary; Roland Barthes (1915-1980), a critic of writing; Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995), in quest of the Other; Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), a critic of modernity; Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), a deconstructionist, all seem rather trendy in America, although in France they are now coming to be considered something as has-beens.  Joe Fletcher knew perfectly well the theoretical and general studies in any field (as the bibliography of his “Integrative History” proves), but he did not feel the need to expose them, nor to distort the facts to square with them.  Let us say that this was, and is, refreshing.

II.  The content(back to top)

When reading the work left by Balazs as by Fletcher, I have the feeling that I get when I watch old black and white movies:  Was life really like that then?  It is a healthy exercise to try to recall the limited scope of historical knowledge when Balazs was writing on China in the fifties, and when Fletcher was writing on eastern and inner Asia in the sixties and seventies.  We must forget the widening of historical perception and theoretical interpretation that took place at an extraordinarily fast pace during the last decades.  Apart from computerization, the great difference between Balazs and Fletcher’s epoch and our own comes from the lack of physical access to the countries they studied – China, Mongolia, Soviet Central Asia – and lack of access to their archives, the wealth of their libraries, the evidence of their monuments, the writings of their scholars, and the accounts of their citizens.  As Fletcher wrote to me in August 1975, in answer to some of my questions:  “The sad truth is that I am not able to be of any help because I have learned nothing about the history of Sinkiang or Islam in China since 1949.”  But, as soon as China began to open its boundaries to foreign scholars at the beginning of the eighties, he was there collecting materials.  We cannot help dreaming about what he might have accomplished had he enjoyed the working conditions we have now.

Nevertheless, the sixties and seventies were not a complete desert.  On the contrary, it was a time of active compilation of general histories and of inventorying the main oriental collections in the world, as if to set the limits of further studies.  As for Joe Fletcher, who tried to push back these limits, it looks as if each of the geographical and cultural fields he explored was in fact his main specialty and his main interest.

A.  Islam in China (back to top)

For me, the most momentous contribution made by Fletcher pertains to the field of Chinese Islam.  At the turn of the eighties, Sino-Islamic studies in Western countries consisted first of all of catalogues of sources, among which ranks the unequalled Islamic Literature in Chinese by the Australian scholar Donald D. Leslie.  Secondly, they included the shrewd observations and rare documents brought from Western China by the French d’Ollone expedition in the first decade of the twentieth century.  These were exploited by Arnold Vissière (1858-1930), a diplomat and a teacher of Chinese language, and some others, but the first World War put an end to this activity, and France ceased being the center of Sino-Islamic studies, which she had been for a while.  Then thirdly, in the English-speaking world, the dominant voices were those of Protestant missionaries who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, answered a special call to evangelize Muslims of Western China; and of a scholar, Raphael Israeli, who has renewed and propagated their message.  In their work we find three broadly accepted lessons: 1) Islam was so heavily sinicized in the course of its development in China that it has departed from the purity of the original religion (an idea which is now recycled by the Chinese supporters of Wahhabism); 2) In what that I see as a contradiction to this tenet, the belief that Islam can exist in China only in a state of permanent conflict with the dominant culture and of constant struggle against the surrounding population (hence the suggestive title of Israeli’s first book, Muslims in China: A Study in Cultural Confrontation [London: Curzon Press, 1980]); 3) the idea of a highly militant movement, the mysterious xinjiao ?V?q3, a term understood as “New Sect” (a better translation is that chosen by Fletcher, “New Teaching”), which missionaries saw as an obscure constellation of small and secret groups, which an outsider, not to mention a foreigner, could not penetrate.

From the beginning of the seventies, Joe Fletcher challenged this conventional set of opinions.  In 1968, he stated that his “current research interest is the history of the Naqshband? order of dervishes in Central Asia.”  At a conference held in Taiwan in 1971 (the proceedings of which were published in 1975), he affirmed that “The New Teaching […] and the Chinese Muslim rebellions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the New Teaching inspired – long a mysterious topic in Chinese history – are part of the history of an Islamic mystical brotherhood that originated in Transoxiana and that played a dramatic role all over Muslim Asia” – in other words, the Jahriyya, a branch of the Naqshband?yya.  He further confirmed his view in a short article published in 1977, thus proving that Chinese Islam has undoubted links with Central Asian Islam.  At the time, however, this view was too new to be fully accepted.  Israeli in his book, after having paid lip service to Fletcher’s theory, went on with his obsession of the Shi’ite and Wahhabite origins of the groups constituting the “New Sect.”  One of his reviewers stated that, in the absence of Fletcher’s further publications, “Israeli’s arguments against Fletcher’s interpretation of what was the Old Sect and the New Sect can neither be accepted nor refuted.” 

But in 1977, Joe Fletcher produced the definitive fact which supported his conviction.  To find it, he had the idea of going to Cairo and then to Yemen to explore the archives in Sana’a.  There, in June, he could write (to his faithful friend, John K. Fairbank, as far as I am aware):  “The news from here (WONDERFUL NEWS!) is that I have found a manuscript in Zbid confirming the Chinese sources and my theories about the nature of the New Teaching and its links with contemporaneous Muslim upheavals in Indonesia, India, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Arabia, North Africa, and the Ottoman Empire.  I am ecstatic.  This crowns years of work.  Now I can publish”.  The fact he ascertained was that the Naqshband? leader, Ma Mingxin ?hn?|3/4?S (1719-1781) was entitled to derive his silsila (chain of support) from two Yemenite mentors, the Naqshband? az-Zayn b. Muhammad ‘Abd al-B?q? al Mizj?ji (1643/4-1725) and his son and successor, ‘Abd al-Kh?liq (ca. 1705-1740).  We too must be ecstatic, because this irrefutable discovery is the proof that Chinese Islam is closely interconnected with worldwide Islam.

Joe Fletcher had just enough time to present his general conclusions about Sufi proselytism, and the history of both Naqshband? branches in China, the Old and the New Teachings, at a conference held in Paris in 1982, which was published in French translation in 1986.  As the editor of this translated article, I had at hand the original English form of the paper, which the journal Études Orientales kindly agreed to publish in its 1994 issue dedicated to “Islam in China” (this title should be added to Fletcher’s bibliography).  Finally, the last, most sophisticated version of Joe Fletcher’s conception of the diffusion, from the fourteenth century forward, of various Islamic trends through Central Asia to China was happily rescued from his unpublished papers by his devoted colleague, Jonathan N. Lipman.  I think this is the most brilliant essay of a most gifted author.

In the mid-eighties, a few years after Fletcher’s death, Chinese scholars could again make their knowledge known at home and abroad.  After the Cultural Revolution, the best way for a Muslim intellectual to have access to Islamic texts in Chinese, Persian, or Arabic and to write on theological, ritual, or historical questions related to his belief, was to be a member of a research institute of history of religions.  Hence the secondary literature on Islam in China, which became extremely copious in the nineties, and the publication of the classical literature of the past, the so-called Han-kitab (in Chinese Han ke-ta-bu?????g??oea^ > Arabic kitab + the Chinese word Han, “ethnically Chinese”), were the work of believers.  The only notable exception is Wang Jianping, the author of useful Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001).  Broadly speaking, Joe Fletcher’s foresighted views have been confirmed by believers’ testimonies, now that the existence of Sufi brotherhoods is no more a secret.  The reliability of his intuitions is astonishing.  Only some points of his extrapolations are no longer valid, as, for example, his genealogy of masters succeeding to Ma Mingxin.

After the opening of China, the way paved by Joe Fletcher swiftly opened up in various directions.  Exit the commonplace about an absolute incompatibility of Islam with the Chinese culture, since the great diversity of situations has been aptly demonstrated by the well-known works of Jonathan Lipman for the past and Dru Gladney for the present.  Exit, too, the image of veiled Muslim women unable to insert themselves into the modern world and to acquire a personal culture, thanks to Maris Gillette, Maria Jaschok, and Shui Jingjun, whose works I am sure are well known here.  There is still an author who is perhaps not yet recognized in America: Elisabeth Allès (from Paris), fluent in Chinese and in Arabic, who has conducted anthropological research in Henan on two topics.  Her first question is how do “Hui” (i.e., Muslim Chinese in Communist China) feel their identity in this province, far away from the Western Chinese regions more broadly associated with Islam?  Her second question deals, like Jaschok and Shui’s book, with the unexpected topic of the women’s mosques that are numerous in this province and with the education delivered by female ahong (Chinese religious leaders in charge of a mosque) to young girls.

For me, the most revolutionary book following in the line of Joe Fletcher’s preoccupations is by Murata Sachiko and her husband William C. Chittick, both specialists of Persian and Arabic Sufism.  Murata translated with remarkable talent two masterpieces of the Han kitab written by Wang Daiyu ?n??ea?No(ca. 1590-ca. 1658) and Liu Zhi ?\?s?fq (ca. 1662-1736).  The point of interest here is that the works of the most beloved Chinese ‘?lim, Liu Zhi, were previously considered devoid of the smallest hint of Sufism.  This is the view, for example, of R. Israeli and of present-day Chinese scholars who prefer to promote a purely lay literature.  There is also the translation of a Chinese adaptation by Liu Zhi of the famous Persian Sufi treatise, the Law?’ih of J?mï (1414-1492), which introduced Ibn al-‘Arab?’s school of thought to China.  Facing each page of Murata’s translation of the Chinese text is a new translation of the Persian text itself by Chittick.

In this way, it is now possible to think about the logical, philological and philosophical ways which Chinese ‘ulam? have followed to transmit the Muslim message in their own language.  The question is a sensitive one, including as it does several different problems concerning the passage from the source language (Arabic or Persian) to the target one (Chinese), as linguists would say.  First, at what level of meaning should we receive Chinese concepts having an obviously Confucian (or, more exactly, what we call Neo-Confucian) hint to render religious, philosophical or moral values?  Murata gives us the beginning of reply, but certainly the logical cohesiveness of the sentences should be tackled by linguistic philosophers such as the German scholars Christoph Harbsmeier or Michael Lackner.  Fruitful parallels may be drawn with Christian literature in Chinese.  Here I mean apologetics written, not by foreign missionaries, but by Chinese Catholic converts from the early seventeenth century such as Yang Tingyun ?\k?fi`? (1562-1627).  I wonder if the launching of a specific Sino-Muslim literature put in Confucian terms in the mid-seventeenth century was not stimulated, if not inspired, by the success of the Christian experiment in places like Nanjing and Hangzhou where Catholic and Muslim communities were thriving.

I have still another strange piece of Christian apologetics that could prove to be a good tool for a comparison of stylistic devices, logical organization of the reasoning, and the repertory of imagery.  The author is a Chinese priest, Jacobus Zhang (1856-1935).  Born in Southern Inner Mongolia, Zhang was converted by Flemish missionaries of the Congregation the Immaculate Heart of Mary (CICM) and briefly trained in a Jesuit institution.  In 1914 (that is, the third year of the Republic) he published in Inner Mongolia, and again at the late date of 1923 at Shanghai, a book in the literary language (wenyan) which displays quite a Neo-Confucian cast of mind, the Chajiao guanjian???q3e`?OE(R)(‘Keys for the Examination of Religion’).  He needed more than three hundred pages to show that Confucianism is an erroneous system of thought and that it is Catholicism which fully implements the moral ideals of Confucianism.

Sachiko Murata is currently finishing a translation of another Liu Zhi’s masterpieces, and thus she goes on opening a new era in the field of Sino-Muslim studies.  The torch can be also passed down to a younger generation.  In a work destined to gain outstanding authority, The Dao of Muhammad, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite relates an until now almost unknown story: the transmission of Chinese Muslim scholarship within educational networks from the fifteenth century, particularly in coastal cities.  Another young scholar, Anthony Garnaut (a PhD candidate at the Australian National University), vividly introduces the view that a modern Muslim novelist, Zhang Chengzhi ?f??f?3?u, has on the Jahriyya in the past: according to Zhang, the Jahriyya upholds the very essence of an anti-institutional activism.  This confirms Joe Fletcher’s hypothesis that “the New Teaching […] has survived into the second half of the twentieth century and is probably still alive today.”

However rich the findings on Chinese Islam and its believers have been during the last two decades, there is still plenty to be discovered, as Jonathan Lipman frequently reminds us.  Several small questions raised by Fletcher are still pending.  Regarding adoption, for example, a frequent means of increasing the community:  “The practice of adoption is a noteworthy example of ‘?da (customary law) in conflict with the shar?‘a (the revealed Holy Law of Islam), and it would be interesting to know the legal devices by which it was justified.”  The same goes for suicide, to which Muslim religious leaders had recourse when the military struggle with governmental army was lost, although “a canonical saying (Hadith) of the Prophet says ‘He who commits suicide, regardless of the circumstances, forfeits Paradise.’  Martyrs are those who die by the hand of others, not by their own hand.”

The very original study of Vincent Goossaert (Paris) on the beef taboo in Chinese society invites us, in the face of beef taboo and of vegetarianism as social markers, to assess anew the position of the pork taboo, of Ramadan as a kind of zhaia^V (abstention or fast), and of the trade of butchering bovines and manufacturing pelts and leather practiced by Muslims in Western China.  The reflections of an excellent French specialist of Inner Asian music, Jean During, on the part played by music in the Sufi dhikr (the remembrance of the name of God) suggests that music could also be a field of interest to illuminate the everyday practice of Chinese Muslim brotherhoods.

I always feel disappointed when I see that a good exposition of a Muslim rebellion misses the main point, which is that Chinese Muslim rebellions (or often, more accurately, internal wars) present all the characteristics of traditional Chinese popular uprisings – a point that David G. Atwill, for example, forgot in his recent work, which demonstrates that responsibility for the slaughter during the so-called Panthay rebellion in nineteenth-century Yunnan was shared between the governmental army and Muslim rebels.  In any case, this observation is the strongest argument against the theory of an inevitable clash between Muslim tenets and Chinese civilization, along the lines of Samuel P. Huntington’s much contested Clash of Civilizations (1996).  Even advocates of the integration of Islam into Chinese culture remain unconsciously imbued with the idea of a potentially permanent state of inter-ethnic conflict and of jih?d.  During the rebellion of the Jahri leader Ma Hua-long ?hn?n?t?\?L in northwestern China between 1862 and 1871, standards bore the inscription kang Qing fu Ming?R??L?oe}?|3/4, “oppose the Qing, support the Ming” (the national dynasty overthrown by the Manchus more than two centuries earlier); letters were dated according to an era name of the Ming time or to the cyclical system; and the ideology and ritual of rebellion are said to have been inspired by a Ming novel.  Muslim leaders in revolt liked to garb themselves as would-be emperors, like the famous Yunnanese rebel, Du Wenxiu ?gm?oe????G, who had a palanquin of the imperial color, yellow, and whose palace halls were referred to by Chinese propitiatory names.

B.  East Turkestan - Xinjiang (back to top)

The other face of Islam in what has become the Greater Chinese world is located in East Turkestan or Xinjiang.  Joe Fletcher tackled this part of the world within two contexts, first as part of the historical development of Inner Asia as a whole.  Here, his successors, mainly American, are proceeding from the field of Chinese and in some cases of Manchu sources, viewing the conquest of East Turkestan in the mid-eighteenth century and the implementation of an economic and later political management from the point of view of Manchu sovereigns and of the Qing Empire.  James A. Millward’s now-classic Beyond the Pass is a landmark (although it did not refer to Manchu archives).  It adds economic facts to Fletcher’s conclusions and corrects, for example (p. 117), the view that Chinese merchants could have been prevented from trading in the cities of Altishahr, the southern part of the country.  But, as Mark C. Elliott has emphasized, a wealth of information on the region is still expected from the rich Manchu archives.

The second context in which Fletcher dealt with East Turkestan is his search of the eastern diffusion of Islam from Central Asia.  The disciple of Fletcher in this field is his last student, Kim Hodong, now a professor at Seoul National University.  His Holy War in China, about the adventure of Ya‘q?b Beg, was first prepared, as a dissertation under his tutelage and displays the same mastery of various languages, to begin with, Turki (or modern Uyghur) – but again without the Manchu.   However, the transnational link at work here is not religion but rebellion, and the bulk of this path-breaking book is finally a political history, while the concept of jih?d, which seems suggested by the title, remains out of the account.  But Kim Hodong has taken the way paved by Fletcher, giving us a refreshing look at East Turkestan directed from the Western and Turkic parts of Central Asia, and from the field of Turcology.

Here Fletcher’s successors will not be found in America.  They are partly in Japan.  Among Japanese Turcologists with an interest in East Turkestan and using Turki sources, the most representative name is that of Hamada Masami a`_?gc?3?hu?N, who publishes in French when not in Japanese.  For example, his article about Jih?d, Hijra and the ‘obligation of salt’ casts light on the ideological contrivances put forward by the Muslim ruling class to justify its submission to the infidel Manchu emperor.  Among Japanese Sinologists and Turcologists who add to the understanding of the history of the Kashgar Khw?ja (or Khoja) and of the holy tombs, we may quote the names of Shinnen Yasushi ?V?|AE?N, Sawada Minoru a`V?gc?|?s, Sugawara Jun ??rOE?L??, and several others.  Evidence that Japanese scholarship carries on its old interest in Inner Asia are the fruitful results of an Islamic Area Studies Project conducted in Tokyo from 1997 to 2001 (with the collaboration of Stéphane Dudoignon, a French Turcologist and Iranist and a fine specialist of Muslims in the Russian empire), and this project adds a great deal to Inner Asian and Central Asian research.

Perceptive studies in Sufi literature written in Chinese have started to make their way in Japan too.  For example, Hamada Masami has raised this question in his teaching; Sato Minoru ?2?g??A` puts into order the various editions of Liu Zhi’s work; Matsumoto Akir? ?1/4?|{aO^?Y studies the Arabic translation, the Sharh al-Lat?’if, that the Yunnanese Ma Lianyuan ?hn?\u?NOE3 (1841-1903) did for the philosophy of Islam, the Tianfang xingli ?gV?oeu^??s?\?, by Liu Zhi.  Nakanishi Tatsuya ?f?o?1/4?\3?|c examines the discourse on the shaykh.  Indeed, in the future, Japanese bibliography cannot be overlooked.

Neither should French publications be forgotten, as they bring a new wave of Turkestanese Islam into the Turkic and Iranian worlds.  The main architect of this renewal of French Islamic studies within the Chinese empire is Thierry Zarcone, who, beginning in the mid-nineties, highlights the political role of Sufism in Southern East Turkestan.  For example, his “Political Sufism and the Emirate of Kashgaria (End of the 19th century): The Role of the Ambassador Ya‘q?b Tora” and “The Sufi Networks in Southern Xinjiang during the Republican Régime (1911-1949): An Overview” are intended to answer some of Fletcher’s questions about political Sufism.  His article on the mausoleum of ?f?q Khwaja at Kashgar was recently complemented by a British scholar, Edmund Waite. The journal Zarcone co-founded in 2000, Journal of the History of Sufism, is an open forum for considering Sufism on both sides of the Sino-Russian boundary.  The third issue (2001-2002), devoted to Saints and Heroes on the Silk Road, and the fourth issue (2003-2004), on The Sufi Dance, enjoy international contributions such as articles by Hamada Masami, Sawada Minoru.  Zarcone’s paper on Naqshband? dances in East Turkestan and Alexandre Papas’ paper on their dance and music begin to answer the question about Sufi music in Inner Asia raised by J. During.

Alexandre Papas deserves praise for his path-breaking book on Sufism and policy between China, Tibet and Turkestan, based first and foremost on manuscripts in Persian, Chagatay and Turki.  This is not just another history of ?f?q Khwaja, founder in 1680 of the ?sh?n régime and of his lineage, fashionable figure though he is.  It is also a reflection on utopia, holiness and power.  Following Fletcher, it is an integrative history of Muslim Inner Asia from the late fifteenth till the mid-eighteenth centuries, focusing upon the maturation of Naqshband? Sufism from the establishment of the Makhd?mz?das to the implementation of ?sh?n political power and its end.  Here we have indeed a momentous book, the closest thing, I think, to Joe Fletcher’s ways of working and thinking.

Other French books worthy of mention are Patrick Garonne’s presentation of the baksylyk of Central Asia, an Islamized shamanism; and Jean-Paul Loubes’s analysis of architecture and urbanization displayed at Turfan.  Nor should we omit the journal ÉtudesOrientales, with articles in French, English and Arabic.  Its target readership is Muslim, and for a decade it has been broadly open to Far Eastern and Inner Asian Islam.  It is currently planning an issue about Xinjiang, to which contributions will be welcome.  The last author I wish to quote in this field is Ildikó Bellér-Hann, a Hungarian by birth, married to a British Turcologist (Chris Hann), and teaching at the prestigious University of the German town of Halle.  An ethnologist working on Turkey, Bellér-Hann is able to cast fresh light on everyday life in Southern Xinjiang.

C.  Mongolian peoples (back to top)

Islam in Eastern Turkestan and China was Joe Fletcher’s lasting and passionate love.  But if we wish to understand the progression of his thought, we must return to the beginning:  Mongolian studies.  Fletcher entered this field following his mentor, Francis Woodman Cleaves (1911-1995), but added a historical dimension to the master’s strong philological turn of mind.  His very first publications were short reviews on Rintchen, Schröder, and Serruys in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 23 (1960), when he was twenty-six years old and still a PhD candidate.  His first scholarly paper, also published in HJAS (Studies, I, 1962-63), and written before he was twenty-eight – just at the time he was elected a Junior Fellow at Harvard – was aimed at demonstrating that “the best known nineteenth-century Mongolian chronicle,” that is, the Erdeni-yin erike, or “Jewelled Rosary,” “is in large part […] an assemblage of passages taken verbatim from other works,” so that it “should be used as a historical source only with great caution.”  This Erdeni-yin erike was then the topic of his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1965.  Another article in Cleaves’ style was the annotated translation of a short private letter acquired in the Etsin Gol region in 1914 by Sir Aurel Stein’s expedition; this letter is written in Oyirad – a language which Fletcher preferred to call – I do not know why – by the name of “Oyirod,” which I have always regarded as mistaken when applied to the Western Mongols (Studies, III, 1970).

But, with his acute awareness of history, he could not be satisfied with a purely philological approach to the sources.  At around the same time, in three reviews of Russian publications, he expressed his conviction about the centrality of the Mongol factor in pre-modern Inner Eurasian history.  Unhappily, these seminal remarks are nearly out of the ordinary reader’s reach: they appeared in a poorly reproduced Russian studies newsletter named Kritika in 1966, 1967, and 1971.  The part that the wars against the Zunghar Mongols and the conquest of their empire played in the affirmation of Manchu power was later demonstrated by Fletcher’s former student (in Manchu language), Peter C. Perdue.  The notion of the Mongols as a pivot in the international game between Russia and the Qing is still a topic of discussion.  But I wonder if a satisfactory reply has been given, even by him, to Fletcher’s query as to possible “basic functional differences distinguishing socioeconomic structures of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the western steppes from those of the Mongolian-speaking peoples of the east,” a question he posed in a short introduction to S. Jagchid and P. Hyer’s Mongolia’s Culture and Society (1979) – a short paper that, strangely, is missing from all the bibliographies of his works.  I know that the parallel he drew between Mongolian and Ottoman transmission of monarchical power (Studies, VII, 1979-80) has been criticized.  I am not in a position to take a stand on this technical point; I shall only say that I enjoyed the article.

Within the last twenty to thirty years, the field of Mongolian and allied studies (Siberian, Tibetan) has expanded enormously.  In Germany, especially at Bonn, the solid tradition of editing and translating sources with a philological approach, is maintained; in England, at Cambridge, the stress is on the characteristics of present-day nomadism approached from a sociological and ecological point of view; at Indiana University, I observe the influence of Hungarian scholarship, thanks to Györgi Kara, the distinguished disciple of Ligeti, who teaches partly at Budapest and partly at Bloomington, where he was invited by the soul of Altaic studies, Denis Sinor, also Hungarian.  In Paris, the field is dominated by two personalities.  The first is Jacques Legrand, chairman of the Academic Council of the International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations (IISNC), launched by UNESCO at Ulan Bator, and also currently president of the venerable Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO or “Langues O”), where he teaches the basis of Mongolian language and culture. The theme he propounds in his numerous lectures is the role played by the ecological context in the evolution of nomadism. 

The second figure is Roberte Hamayon, who for thirty-two years taught shamanism at the École pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE), Section of Religious Sciences, at the Sorbonne.  She is the founder of the Centre d’études mongoles (CEM) and of the periodical Études mongoles et sibériennes (EMS) which in its issue 35 (2004), became Etudes mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines (EMSCAT).  A glance at the table of contents of the last issues testifies to the variety of interests of many gifted young researchers.  I would cite those who have concluded their theses and who are already propelled into the professional arena:  Isabelle Charleux, a specialist of Tibeto-Mongolian art; Gaëlle Lacaze, an ethnologist who knows (almost) everything about the representation and techniques concerning the body among the Mongols; Laetitia Merli, a specialist of postcommunist Mongolian shamanism; Jean-Luc Lambert on Nganassan shamanism; Virgine Vaté on the Chukchees; Alexandra Lavrillier on the Evenks; Patrick Plattet on populations of northern Kamchatka; Charles Stépanoff on shamanism in Tuva; Carole Ferret on the Central Asian horse, and so on.  We must not forget Marie-Dominique Even, part of a slightly earlier generation, who in 1994 produced the first complete French translation of the Secret History of the Mongols in the prestigious CollectionUNESCO d’oeuvres représentatives, in cooperation with the Romanian Mongolist Rodica Pop.  Pop also presented her viva voce in Paris on marriage rites among the Mongols, and we intend to publish her book as a monograph appended to EMSCAT.

One interesting project that has begun to bear fruit thanks to R. Hamayon and her very gifted disciple Alexandra Lavrillier, working under the tutelage of the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, is a computerized database that fits in the framework of the European ECHO program (European Cultural Heritage Online) launched by the Max Planck Institute under the rubric of “Objects and Societies.”  The database aims to present non-European societies through their objects held in European museums.  The first society depicted is the Tungus Evenks.  The next program should be on Mongolian and Kirghiz peoples.

I wish also to consider for a moment the field of Mongolian law, for which I have a particular liking, as an example to show the intertwining of works from various countries and in various languages.  A general view and the relevant bibliography can be found in a collective work on Central Asia Law: An Historical Overview.  As for the Mongol peoples, my main argument is that they have displayed an amazing legal sense at each turn of their history, and that this characteristic could possibly be put in parallel with their remarkable cleverness at any game of intelligence or calculation.  To begin with, there is the problem of the so-called jasaq or yasaq of Chinggis Khan: the latest state of knowledge on this intriguing subject comes from a French historian, Denise Aigle, a disciple of Jean Aubin.  After the important translations of the law of the Yuan period by P. Ratchnevsky, of the Khitan-Liao and Jürchen-Jin laws by Herbert Franke, and of the Code of 1291 by Heng-chao Ch’en, an important breakthrough was made in 2002 by Bettine Birge in her work on female property within marriage in Song and Yuan times.  But I am sure that if she has been able to cope so fully with the strange language of the juridical compilation Yuan dianzhang (in 13th-14th-century spoken Mongolian rendered into the spoken Chinese of the period), this is because the Japanese scholars of the Institute for Humanistic Research (Jinbun kagaku kenky?jo) of Ky?to University, including Tanaka Kenji ?gc?f?oOE??gn and others, paved the way in the sixties with their study of the language of this compilation (I myself had the good fortune in 1961 to attend the seminar prior to a large publication).

Future areas for research are native laws of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, eighteen of which have been translated into Russian and studied by Alexei D. Nasilov in 2004.  More information on Mongol law may be derived from the collection of manuscripts on birch bark carefully studied in Bonn by Elisabetta Chiodo, with the co-operation of Klaus Sagaster for the Tibetan parts.  The Mongol-Oyirad Code of 1640 has also been translated into Russian by Sandzhe D. Dylykov (1981), as has the Qalqa zhirum (1965).  The translation into German of some Mongol-Manchu regulations is due to Michael Weiers, the historian of Manchu at Bonn University.  Other regulations have been translated into German by Dorothea Heuschert in a lengthy solid study, and into English in some articles by Veronika Veit, historian at Bonn University of the Mongols under Manchu domination.  An overall study in Japanese of the Qing legislation for Mongolian principalities was the long toil of Shimada Masao ?g?o?N?gc?3?N, a former professor at the Meiji University of T?kyo.

D.  Manchu and Qing history (back to top)

In 1975, Joe Fletcher wrote to me as follows: “My own work relates mainly to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”  If we add the eighteenth and first half of nineteenth century to this statement, we have the unifying component of his entire published work.  His studies of Central Asian and Chinese Islam, of Mongolian history and others were all aimed at shedding light on the Qing time, either directly or by comparison.  In the field of Manchu and Qing studies, he has been a prophet in several ways.  The originality and boldness of the stands he took are all the more striking in that he worked closely with his former teacher and head of his department John K. Fairbank (1907-1991).  Fairbank, great in physical as well in academic stature, was of course the indisputable herald of the view of late imperial China being forced to satisfy the greed of the Western powers, and whose politics were turned towards the coast.

Fletcher wished to see the study of Manchu language become widespread and used for unearthing the wealth of the Qing archives.  In 1973 he wrote: “For students of the early Ch’ing […], Manchu is essential.  Fortunately, it is an easy language, and for anyone who reads Chinese, as little as a year of study can unlock the vast store of Manchu sources.”  His wish in this regard is wholly fulfilled.  After a long period of skepticism, the utility of Manchu sources has become self-evident, so much so that now their use is the first criterion by which to evaluate any study of the first half of the Manchu dynasty. 

Here, in the temple of Manchu and Qing studies, I shall not dwell at length on the achievements either of Fletcher or of American scholarship in this field.  For the past, there is only one name I wish to recall along with the one of Fletcher:  David M. Farquhar (1927-1985), who, like Fletcher, was a student of Francis Cleaves.  For the present, suffice it to say that the work which, in my opinion, best opens a new way of understanding the particularities of the Manchu regime is Mark C. Elliott’s The Manchu Way.  His demonstration of the central role played by the Banner system to support a feeling of “Manchu-ness,” considered as essential by the imperial power, is a good example of the Fletcherian tradition.  In Europe, Manchu studies are flourishing thanks to the Italian Manjurist Giovanni Stary, a philologist, historian of shamanism and of pre-dynastic Manchu power, and a fantastic bibliographer.  The field is of course strong in Germany, where numerous scholars, such as Hartmut Walravens, a specialist of manuscripts who works at Berlin.  Others, like Michael Weiers at Bonn University, are also Mongolists, following the lines set by Eric Haenisch (1879-1966), and excel at translation.  It is notable that the Inner Mongolian Manjurist, Jakhadai Cimeddorj, writes in German.  France is quite absent from the field, while Russia, perpetuating an old and glorious tradition, keeps an honorable place with Tatiana A. Pang, Konstantin S. Yakhontov, Liliya M. Gorelova, the Tibetologist Vladimir Uspensky, and so on.

In what was then a new assessment of the international position of imperial China, Fletcher closely examined the Inner Asian connection.  He demonstrated the extraordinary adaptability and rationality of imperial diplomacy with two cases taken from different historical settings: the early Ming recognizing equality with the Timurid Sh?hrukh Bah?dur, and the Qing doing the same thing in the mid-eighteenth century with Kokand, while internal propaganda maintained the myth of absolute Chinese superiority and world suzerainty.  When he published his innovative article in 1968 (Studies, II), the idea he defended was beginning to be touched upon, but certainly not for the Ming-Qing period.  Then Herbert Franke demonstrated that in the twelfth century the Song accepted the humiliating status of vassals of the Jürchen to safeguard peace and Father Henry Serruys analyzed the high price the alleged Mongolian tribute cost the Ming court.  Some years later, the title of a collective book, China Among Equals, testifies that such a view had become accepted knowledge among historians of China.

Fletcher extended his discourse in a way which belonged to him alone.  He related a delicious story:  the principle of ‘unequal treaties,’ implemented on the coast after the Opium War in 1842, was not a British invention, as they liked to claim, but the mere repetition of a model invented at Kashgar in 1835 to solve a conflict with Kokandian merchants.  He also underlined the opportunistic attitude of the Manchu dynasty for governing the various people subjected to its power: Tibetan Buddhism served as a tool of dialogue with the Mongols, Islam was used to keep East Turkestan quiet, while Zhu Xi’s Confucianism was intended to gain the sympathy of the Chinese lettered class.

A further step was to apply to China the methods and concepts of Fernand Braudel (1902-1985).  As is well known, Braudel elaborated on the Mediterranean world as a geographical and cultural unit of comparative study beyond the scope of the nation-state, and extended his view over the celebrated longue durée.  This way of looking at history was defended by the leading journal Annales, of which Braudel was the sole editor from 1956 until 1969, and then later co-editor with younger historians.  When he was supporting Balazs’ Song project in the mid-fifties, Braudel was very interested in Chinese history, and the integrative unit of reflection he used was, of course, the sea.  Much later, the sea was the unifying factor in the Braudelian thesis of Denys Lombard (1938-1998), who dealt with southeast Asia in Le carrefour javanais (The Javanese crossroads), the sub-title of which speaks for itself:  “an essay in global history.”  The seas surrounding India have formed another Braudelian unity of analysis for Kirti N. Chaudhuri and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Fletcher’s inspired intuition was to reject the dictum championed by Fairbank, that the most important part of the history of late imperial China was played out on the coastal regions.  Rather, in his three chapters in Fairbank’s tenth volume of the Cambridge History of China, he masterly demonstrated that the main boundaries of the late Chinese empire were continental and not coastal, that the foreign contacts that mattered to it came from the west and north, and that the empire is restored to its full dimensions when its Manchu, Mongolian, Turkestani and Tibetan possessions are fully taken into account.

When this tenth volume was published in 1978, it met with dry criticism – with the exception of Joe Fletcher’s contributions, which were highly praised:  “The freshest and most useful portions of this volume are the chapters on Ch’ing Inner Asia by Joseph Fletcher.  It is the good fortune of the China profession to have at long last a philologist well versed not only in Chinese and key Inner Asian languages, but also in history and social sciences.  His initial historical perspective is an eye-opener for general readers, as well as for most modern China specialists:  ‘Three changes occurred in the eighteenth century that set the course of China’s subsequent history.  The change that has received the most scholarly attention is the solid establishment of Europe’s presence.  But two other changes may prove to have been of greater significance in the long run.  One of these was a doubling of the territorial size of the Chinese empire.  The other was the doubling of Han Chinese population. The interplay of these three factors has set the direction of China’s history in modern times’.”  Or this comment by another reviewer:  “The outstanding positive feature of the coverage given in [this] Part I is the detailed treatment of China’s inner Asian frontiers by Professor Fletcher.  The dual character of the Ch’ing empire, and the error of equating it historically with ‘China,’ are emphasized.  So is the role of the Chinese as colonialists.  In general, the imbalance created by Western historiography’s undue emphasis on China’s coasts is here satisfactorily corrected.”

Recently, R. Bin Wong has drawn a very well-informed comparative account of present-day Braudelian studies around both maritime Asia and northwestern China.  Himself a supporter of Braudel’s views, he confirms that his friend Joe Fletcher, who quoted the French historian extensively, was also his admirer.  Nowadays, integrative histories of the Inner Eurasian and Chinese worlds have become a flourishing and diversified arena.  They go from Nicola di Cosmo’s chronicle of the affirmation of Xiongnu power facing Han China, to David Christian’s ecologically minded general record taken through to the time of Chinggis Khan, and including as well Thomas Barfield’s account of the relationship between the “nomadic empires” and China and a new vision of Qing Empire centered on its outlying possessions.

The final step taken by Fletcher was his celebrated integrative world history, made of parallels and interconnections from 1500 to 1800 (Studies, X, posthumous).  He undertook this in a light-hearted way, using a “plane’s eye-view of the mosaic,” which has all the qualities of a vivid oral lesson.  But his aim is very serious and the seven parallels he reconstructs are extremely well documented:  in population growth, the acceleration of the pace of life, urbanization, the rise of urban commercial classes, religious revivals and fundamentalist movements, rural unrest, and the decline of nomadism.  At his time, as far as I am aware, the only author of a comparative world history who could compete with Fletcher in the extent of his cultural range, though from an Islamic standpoint, was Marshall G.S. Hodgson (1922-1968).  World histories became truly fashionable only in the nineties.  They aimed either to destroy the Eurocentric approach, which was imputed, among others, to Immanuel Wallerstein, or to oppose the theory of Chinese isolationism.  Among the outstanding titles, Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony belongs to the first school; R. Bin Wong’s ChinaTransformed and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence to the second.

But ‘global’ or ‘integrative’ history seems to be also a trendy catchword enabling one to combine in a common work specialists coming from different fields, often with disappointing results.  Thus Michael Adas’s 1993 Islamic & European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order has been criticized for its numerous omissions and its lack of a sound conceptualization.  The 2004 work, The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time, edited by Lynn A. Struve, is not a world history, but a stress on the Manchu aspects of Qing China and the significance of Inner Asia world in its assertion as an empire.  Ultimately, it seems that the Fletcherian parallels of global history, if rivaled and complemented, are still not superseded.

Conclusion (back to top)

Having reached the end of these reflections, I observe that for an outsider Joe Fletcher remains an unknown personality.  It seldom happens that information about a scholar of such stature is so scarce:  We have heard only about the date of his PhD thesis (1965), about his academic positions, and about his kindness.  From Bin Wong, we hear, too, about a course on the empires he taught with S. N. Eisenstadt – an important clue to a possible exchange of influences with the great sociologist of empires and urbanization.  We find an indication of his sense of fun in his idea of an aerial view of world history; of his realism and ability to keep his distance from his sources in a charming remark at the end of his Integrative History:  “I suspect that most of the data of historical demography, i.e. that cited above under Parallelism I, are highly inexact” (Studies, X: 34, n. 51).

I have other evidence of his inner feelings.  In a letter dated August 30, 1982, he wrote to me after I told him that I was studying the activity of the Protestant interdenominational society, the ChinaInlandMission (CIM), amongst Muslim Chinese:  “The China Inland Mission is indeed a fascinating topic. My conversations with Claude Pickens and his wife give glimpses into another Anglo-American world, not just another China.  As the son of an Anglican theologian, I am equipped with the tools for a certain amount of comprehension of the missionaries, but I have become a believing atheist (of a loving, not angry type) and this gives me an interesting perspective on them.  I think that the Christian ethic is mankind’s greatest achievement, but the Christian theology poses more questions for me than it answers, and it is for this reason that I have given up.  But of course, if one believes that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god IS NOT, then how does one answer the question of where we came from and for what purpose we live?  This is the perplexity that tickles my fancy.”

In the end, perhaps Ralph W. Emerson (1803-1882) put it best, writing as though in anticipation of someone like Fletcher:  “Geniuses have the shortest biographies, because their inner lives are led out of sight and earshot.”

Joe Fletcher’s memory is often recalled by scholars who knew him.  Pamela Kyle Crossley fondly dedicates to him her book, TheManchus:  “For Joseph Francis Fletcher, Jr., who should have written it.”  Isenbike Togan, the Turkish specialist of the early Chinggisid empire, remembers that she developed her penchant for comparative Inner Asian history during the first semester of her graduate study in one of the classes of Joseph Fletcher and that she was inspired by Fletcher’s “horizontal continuities” as well as by F. Braudel’s views.  Bin Wong quotes him frequently and remembers the conversations he had with him.  Even younger scholars, such as Alexandre Papas, who was a little boy at the time of Fletcher’s death and never knew him, seem to engage with him in discussion.

I don’t know if I must apologize for having quoted too many names of possible heirs of his work and mind-set, or for having dropped too many of them, so broad have become his fields of interest.  But while trying to collect any scrap of information about him, I noticed that his name was missing in many books which could have been expected to mention it, at least in the final bibliography.

It is high time to revive his reputation.  With this aim in view, I would suggest a new publication of some collected works, not in an expensive hard-bound form, as the Variorum reprints series, but in a inexpensive paperback edition that students could afford to buy.  We should not forget that he was always worrying about students’ accessibility to sources.  As for the content, I would propose, first, a reprint of his twenty-two reviews, especially the ones published in the confidential Kritika.  He reviewed some important books which laid the basis for present-day knowledge and his philological as well as historical remarks are still worthy of attention; moreover, his first brief reviews, published when he was only twenty-six or twenty-eight, could act as models for young people wishing to enter into the profession.

Next, I shall argue for the inclusion of the excellent review Bin Wong wrote on the Studies:  for me, it is the best summary of Fletcher’s views.  Maybe a longer presentation could even be requested from him.  A reprint of both papers forgotten in his bibliographies would be welcome too:  his short “Foreword” for S. Jagchid & P. Hyer’s Mongolia’s Culture and Society (1979), and the original English version of his paper “The Sufi ‘Paths,’ turuq, in China,” mentioned above.  It certainly would be wrong to suppose that this paper of twelve pages is replaced by the longer and more detailed posthumous article published by J. Lipman as Studies, XI, “The Naqshbandiyya in Northwest China.”  It has its own usefulness as an overall survey of the question, and it will be appreciated by outsiders wishing to be gently introduced into a very complex and difficult subject.

The main body of such a volume should be the three articles that in 1986 were announced as forthcoming:  “The emergence of the Uzbeks” and “The Eastern Chagadayid Realm” were planned for The Cambridge History of Inner Asia; and “The Rise of the Manchus” for the ninth volume of The Cambridge History of China, in collaboration with Gertrude Roth-Li.  But the first volume of Cambridge History of Inner Asia stops before the Chinggisid empire, and its editor, Denis Sinor, made clear that there will not be any further volumes.  Does the long introductory chapter of the ninth volume of the The Cambridge History of China dealing with “Manchu state building before 1644” include the whole paper prepared with Fletcher?  It is up to the Committee for Inner Asian and Altaic Studies to trace these lost articles and to make them known.  Otherwise they will be lost forever, a tragic waste.

For Joseph Fletcher is an author for our time.

Notes (back to top)

  P.C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

  For example: J. Legrand, “Nomades et sédentaires,” in Mongolie: Le premier empire des steppes (Actes Sud/Monaco: Grimaldi Forum/Mission archéologique française en Mongolie, 2003): 45-59.

 This data bank is called “Non-European Components of European Patrimony” (NECEP) and its address is <http://www.necep.net>.  I have been told that it takes 32 hours to consult the whole Evenk program (pictures, movies, songs, texts in four languages: English, French, Russian and Chinese).  A. Lavrillier is currently translating into Evenk this first program she created.

  Wallace Johnson and Irina F. Popova, eds., Central Asia Law: An Historical Overview. A Festschrift for the Ninetieth Birthday of Herbert Franke (Topeka, Kansas: Society for Asian Legal History, 2004).  This book is the offspring of a 2003 colloquium held at Leiden University.  I also wish to cite the last international meeting I know on the subject which discussed the topic of Representing Power in Asia [Inner Asia]: Legitimising, consecrating, contesting, held in Paris in March 2006.  It was convened by R. Hamayon, who intends to publish its proceedings in EMSCAT.

  F. Aubin, “Some Characteristics of Penal Legislation among the Mongols (13th – 21st Centuries),” in Central Asian Law: An Historical Overview: 119-151.

  D. Aigle, “Le grand jasaq de Gengis-khan, l’empire, la culture mongole et la shar?‘a,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47.1 (2004): 31-79; “Loi mongole vs loi islamique. Entre mythe et réalité,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales, 59.5-6 (2004): 971-996.

  Paul Ratchnevsky, who studied with Paul Pelliot, began his publication of Un Code des Yuan (4 vol.) in 1937 only to finish it in 1985 (as ‘Bibliothèque de l’Institut des Hautes Études chinoises,” IV).

  Herbert Franke, “Jurchen Customary Law and the Chinese Law of the Chin Dynasty,” in D. Eikemeier and H. Franke, eds, State and Law in East Asia: Festschrift Karl Bünger (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1981): 215-233; “The Legal System of the Chin Dynasty,” in Tsuyoshi Kinugawa, ed., Collected Studies on Sung History Dedicated to Professor James T.C. Liu (Ky?to: Doh?sha, 1989): 387-409.

  Paul Heng-chao Ch'en, China’s Legal Tradition under the Mongols: The Code of 1291 as Reconstructed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

  B. Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China, 960-1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  These laws and their translations are listed in F. Aubin, “Les sanctions et les peines chez les Mongols,” La Peine / Punishment, Quatrième partie, Mondes non européens / Non European Worlds (Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions 58), (Brussels: De Boek Université: 242-293): 255-258, with summary of their content on pp. 258-285.

  See A. Nasilov, “The Eighteen Steppe Laws – A Source for the Study of Medieval Mongolian Law,” in Johnson and Popova, eds., Central Asian Law: 65-93.

  D. Heuschert, Die Gesetzgebung die Qing für die Mongolen im 17. Jahrhundert anhand des Mongolischen Gesetzuches aus der Kangxi-Zeit, 1662-1722 (Asiatische Forschungen 134), (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz, 1998).

  See, for example, V. Veit, “Disputes over Land-use in Qing Outer Mongolia: Some Remarks on a Legal Question from an Historian’s Point of View,” in Johnson and Popova, eds., Central Asia Law: 95-106.

  M. Shimada, Shinch? M?korei no kenky???L?f(C)?|O?NOEA?\a?L?I`OE??q?o(T?y? h?shi hensh?’ ?gOE?\m?|@?j?oeO`?W), (T?ky?, 1982), being a revised collection of articles published since the mid-fifties in periodicals specializing in the history of law, such as H?shigaku kenky??|@?j?r{OE??q?oor H?ritsurons? ?|@?\???_?ep, or in edited volumes.  His last general survey, centered on the thirteenth century, is Hopp? Y?rashia h?kei ts?shi?|k?oeu^??o-??n?V?A?|@OEn?fE^?j (T?ky?, 1995).

  J. Fletcher, “Manchu Sources,” in D.D. Leslie, C. Mackerras & Wang Gungwu, eds., Essays on the Sources for Chinese History (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973): 141-146 [145].

  D.M. Farquhar’slandmark article is well known: “Emperor as Bodhisattva in the Governance of the Ch’ing Empire,” HJAS 38.1 (1978): 5-34.  Like Fletcher, his talents were diverse, as we owe him a precious handbook of Yuan administration: The Government of China under Mongolian Rule: A Reference Guide (Münchener Ostasiatische Studien 53), (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990).

  M.C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

  H. Franke, “Treaties between Sung and Chin,” in F. Aubin, éd., Études Song/Sung Studies in Memoriam Etienne Balazs, Ser. 1, Histoire et institutions/History and Institutions 1 (Paris: Mouton & Co, & EPHE, 6e section, 1970): 55-84.

  H. Serruys, The Tribute System and Diplomatic Missions (1400-1600) – Sino-Mongol Relations during the Ming (Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 14), (Brussels: Institut belge des Hautes Etudes chinoises, 1967).

  Morris Rossabi, ed., China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

  In The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, Part I (1978): 378.

  F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1st  ed., Paris: A. Colin, 1949; 2nd enlarged ed., Paris: A. Colin, 1966; 9th ed., 2004); English edition: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols (New York: Harper & Row, 1972-73).  On Braudel and the Annales school, see M. Aymard, A. Caillé, F. Dosse et al., eds., Lire Braudel (Paris: La Découverte, 1988) or Pierre Daix, Fernand Braudel (Paris: Flammarion, 1996).

  D. Lombard, Le carrefour javanais: essai d’histoire globale (Paris : Ed. de l’EHESS, 2004).

  K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); S. Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990).

  J.K. Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10¸ Late Ch’ing, 1800-1911, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).  The chapters by J. Fletcher include ch. 2, “Ch’ing Inner Asia c.1800,” pp. 35-106; ch. 7, “Sino-Russian relations, 1800-1862,” pp. 318-350; and ch. 8, “The heyday of the Ch’ing order in Mongolia, Sinkiang and Tibet,” pp. 351-408.

  Review by Ping-ti Ho in Journal of Asian Studies 39.1 (1979): 134.

  Review by Mark Elvin in China Quarterly 79 (1979): 615.

  R. Bin Wong, “Entre monde et nation: les régions braudéliennes en Asie,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales, 2001.1: 5-41; about the Mediterranean Sea as a region: 6-9; maritime Asia: 9-18; north-western China: 18-23.

  N. di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies. The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  D. Christian, A History  of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia.Volume I:Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (Oxford & Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 1998).

  T.J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).  In addition, we have at our disposal several general histories of Inner Asia, which are additions of separate chapters on each state or political entity, either written by a single author, as with Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), or by a collective group, as with the UNESCO History of Civilizations of Central Asia, which cover from the first volume, The Dawn of Civilization (1992) to the sixth, Towards the Contemporary Period (2005).

  For example, see J.A. Millward, R.W. Dunnell, M.C. Elliott, and P. Forêt, eds., New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Changde (London & New York: Routledge, 2004).

  M.G.S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  This posthumous work (the author, a specialist of Islam, met an untimely end at forty-six) is a collection of articles published since 1941, when Hodgson was nineteen, or unpublished, which attempted to include Islam in the course of world history.

  I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980, 1988).

  J.L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  Review by Ira M. Lapidus in American Historical Review, April 1995: 482-483; by Andre Gunder Frank, in Journal of Asian Studies 54.1 (1995): 164-165.

   R. Bin Wong in a review of Studies, in JESHO 40.3 (1997): 326.

  Claude L. Pickens, Jr. (1900-1985), minister of the American Episcopalian church, was in China from 1926 to 1950.  At Hankou, he was in charge of Protestant missionary propaganda aimed at converting Muslim believers; he later settled in Annisquan, Mass., where Fletcher visited him.  Fletcher’s death was for him a hard trial.  In the introduction to the edition of letters between Pickens and F.W. Martin Taylor, which Fletcher prepared and which received a posthumous publication (ed. by J. Lipman, in Cental & Inner Asian Studies, 3, 1989: 1-35), he asserts mistakenly (p. 1) that the Pickenses were members of the China Inland Mission; in fact only F.W. Martin belonged to this Society; and C. Pickens’ date of death is January 25, 1985, not February (see F.Aubin, “L’apostolat protestant en milieu musulman chinois,” in Chine et Europe: évolution et particularités des rapports Est-Ouest du XVIe au XXe siècle. Actes du IVe Colloque international de Sinologie de Chantilly, 1983 (Variétés sinologiques N.S. 73), (Hong Kong: Ricci Institute, 1983): 12-74 [26-27].

  Elisabeth Zwemer Pickens was the daughter of Samuel M. Zwemer (1867-1952), the famous American Presbyterian missionary in Arab regions from 1890 to his death (see F. Aubin, “L’apostolat protestant en milieu musulman chinois,” quoted above).

  P.K. Crossley, The Manchus (Cambridge, Mass., & Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

  I. Togan, Flexibility & Limitation in Steppe Formations: The Kerait Khanate & Chinggis Khan (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

  JESHO 40.3 (1997): 325-327.

  In HJAS 46.1 (1986): 8-9.

  D.D. Leslie, Islamic Literature in Chinese, late Ming and early Ch’ing: Books, Authors, and Associates (Belconnen: Canberra College of Advanced Education, 1981).  We now additionally owe to Leslie and his two collaborators a splendid bibliographical guide covering the whole field, including primary sources as well as studies with a wealth of various information classified by topics.  See D.D. Leslie, Yang Daye, and Ahmed Youssef, Islam in Traditional China: A Bibliographical Guide, Monumenta Serica Monograph Series 54, (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica Institute, 2006).

  Henri d’Ollone, Recherches sur les musulmans chinois, par le commandant d’Ollone, le capitaine de Fleurelle, le capitaine Lepage, le lieutenant de Boyve, études de A. Vissière, notes de E. Blochet et de divers savants (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1911).

  The Chinese World Order (1968): 338.

  Studies, IV (1975): 75.

  Studies, VI (1977).

  Eden Naby, review of Israeli, Muslims in China, in Journal of the American Oriental Society 108.1, (1988): 173.

  Quotation given in Fund.  For a summary of the story of Fletcher’s search in Egypt and Yemen see J. Lipman in Studies, XI: 1-2.

  Joseph Fletcher, “Les ‘voies’ (?uruq) soufies en Chine,” in A. Popovic & G. Veinstein, eds., Les ordres mystiques dans l’islam: Cheminements et situation actuelle, Recherches d’histoire et de sciences sociales/Studies in History and the Social Sciences 13 (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1986): 13-26.

  Joseph Fletcher, “The Sufi ‘Paths’ (?uruq) in China,” Études orientales 13-14 (1994): 55-69.

  Studies, XI (posthumous).

  See Naqshbandis: Cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman / Historical Developments and Present Situation of a Muslim Mystical Order, (Varia Turcica 18), M. Gaborieau, A. Popovic & T. Zarcone, eds., (Institut français d’Études anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1990): 491-572, especially the tables on pp. 524-531.

  J. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

  D.C. Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2nd ed. 1996).

  M.B. Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

  M. Jaschok & Shui Jingjun, A Mosque of Their Own: The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000).

  E. Alles, Musulmans de Chine: Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan (Recherches d’histoire et de sciences sociales 89) (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2000).

  Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yü’s Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm, with a new Translation of J?mi’s Law?’ih from the Persian, by William C. Chittick, with a foreword by Tu Weiming (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000).

  R. Israeli, Muslims in China (1980): 162.

The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005);A. Garnaut, “Pen of the Jahriyya: A Commentary on the History of the Soul by Zhang Zhengzhi,” Inner Asia 8.1 (2006): 29-50.

Studies, IV (1975) : 79. 

  Studies, IV (1975) : 92, n. 1

  V. Goossaert, L’interdit du bœuf en Chine: Agriculture, éthique et sacrifice (Paris: Collège de France, 2005).  See the convenient summary in English: “The Beef Taboo and the Sacrificial Structure of Late Imperial Chinese Society,” in R. Sterckx, ed., Of Tripod and Palate. Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China (London: Macmillan, 2005): 237-248.

  J. During, Musique et extase: L’audition mystique dans la tradition soufie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988).

  D.G. Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1850-1873 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).

  In China, novels always played an important part in the transmission of  the ideal archetype of the rebellion. Here, the quoted Ming novel was entitled Shihui bao Zhu  ?\?nn?oeU^?e?L , “Ten times to protect Zhu [= Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming who overthrew the Mongolian dynasty of the Yuan],” which is otherwise unknown.

  J.A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759-1864 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

  In D. Twitchett & J.K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10, Late Ch’ing, 180-1911, Part I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 76.

  Kim Hodong, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford University Press, 2004).

  Hamada Masami now holds the Kyoto chair opened by his mentor, Haneda Akira ?nH?gc?|3/4 (1910-1989).

  M. Hamada, “Jih?d, hijra et le ‘devoir du sel’ dans l’histoire du Turkestan oriental,” Turcica 33 (2001): 35-61.

  Among the publications produced by the Project are these bibliographies: S.A. Dudoignon & H. Komatsu, eds., Research Trends in Modern Central Eurasian Studies (18th-20th Centuries): A Selective and Critical Bibliography of Works Published between 1985 and 2000 (T?ky?: The T?y? Bunko), Part I (2003), Part II (2006), with an international contribution [see particularly M. Hamada, “Research Trends in Xinjiang Studies” I (2003): 69-86].  There are also conferences, of which some proceedings can be seen in S.A. Dudoignon & H. Komatsu, eds.,  Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia, Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries (London, New York, Bahrain: Kegan Paul, 2001) or, more recently, S.A. Dudoignon, H. Komatsu and Y. Kosugi, eds., Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World: Transmission. Transformation, Communication (London & New York: Routledge, 2006)

  See T?y? gakuh? 82.3 (2000): 371-402.

  See T?y?shi kenky? 58.1 (1999): 176-211.  Matsumoto Akir?’s wife, Matsumoto Masumi ?1/4?|{?U?N?A^?Y?L, is interested in the weight of Islam specifically in the formulation of nationalism in Republican and contemporary China: see her contribution to Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World (2006): 117-142.

  Op.cit., 61.3 (2002): 553-584.

  In A. von Kügelgen, M. Kemper & A.J. Frank, eds., Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 2 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1998): 153-165.

  In Dudoignon and Komatsu eds., Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia: 119-132.

  Th. Zarcone, “Quand le saint légitime la politique: le mausolée de Afaq Khwaja à Kashgar,” Central Asian Survey 18.2 (1999): 225-241; see E. Waite, “From Holy Man to National Villain: Popular Historical Narratives about Apaq Khoja amongst Uyghurs in Contemporary Xinjiang,” Inner Asia 8.1 (2006): 5-28.

  Journal of the History of Sufism / Journal d’histoire du soufisme or JHS (Paris: Jean Maisonneuve Successeur), No 1-2 in one issue, 2000.  By Th. Zarcone, “La Q?diriyya en Asie centrale et au Turkestan oriental”: 295-338; by Ma Tong, trans. J. Lipman, “A brief history of the Q?diriyya in China”: 547-576.

  Th. Zarcone, “Les danses Naqshband? en Asie centrale et au Xinjiang: histoire et actualité,” Journal of the History of Sufism 4 (2003-2004): 181-198.

  A. Papas, “‘Dansez et chantez’: le droit au sam?‘ selon ?f?q Khw?ja, Maître naqshband? du Turkestan (XVIIe siècle),” Journal of the History of Sufism 4 (2003-2004): 169-180.

  A. Papas, Soufisme et politique entre Chine, Tibet et Turkestan (Monde caucasien et tatar - Asie centrale et Haute Asie 2), (Paris: Jean Maisonneuve Successeur, 2005).

  P. Garrone, Chamanisme et islam en Asie centrale: La Baksylyk hier et aujourd’hui (Monde caucasien et tatar - Asie centrale et Haute Asie 1), (Paris : Jean Maisonneuve Successeur, 2000).

  J.-P. Loubes, Architecture et urbanisme de Turfan: Une oasis du Turkestan chinois (Paris-Québec: L’Harmattan, 1998).

  Études orientales: Revue culturelle semestrielle (published by C.R.E.O., BP 225- F 75464 Paris Cedex 10), No 13-14 (1994), “L’islam en Chine: réalités et perspectives”; No 15-16 (1995), “Etat, nomades et transition et Islam et art de la médecine”; No 19-20 (2003), “L’Islam en Chine (suite)”; N° 21-22 (2004), “Le Japon et l’islam, L’islam au Japon”; No 23-24 (2005), “Perspectives islamiques sur science et religion.”

  Some examples of I. Bellér-Hann’s publications: The Written and the Spoken: Literacy and Oral Transmission among the Uyghur (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000); “‘Making the Oil Flagrant’: Dealings with the Supernatural among the Uyghurs in Xinjiang,” Asian Ethnicity 2.1 (2001): 9-23; “Temperamental Neighbours: Uighur-Han Relations in Xinjiang, Northwest China,” in G. Schlee, ed., Imagined Differences: Hatred and the Construction of Identity (“Market, Culture and Society” No 5), (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2002): 57-81.  On a corner of Turkey: I. Bellér-Hann & C. Hann, Turkish Region (Oxford: James Currey & Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2001).

* Fletcher’s main articles, printed or reprinted in Beatrice Forbes Manz, ed., Studies on Chinese and Islamic Inner Asia, no. 480 in the Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1995), are quoted below as Studies plus the number of the article in the volume:  I,II, etc.., plus the year of publication of the said article and the page numbers in the original publication.  A bibliography of published and unpublished papers by J. Fletcher can be found in Studies, pp. xi-xiv; in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46.1 (June 1986): 7-10; or in Late Imperial China 6.2 (December 1985): 111-113.  Details of the personality and work of J. Fletcher come from the Preface to Studies (by B. F. Manz, pp. vii-x) and from a typewritten newsletter The Joseph F. Fletcher, Jr. Fund for Inner Asian Studies at Harvard University, n.d. [1985], quoted here as Fund.

A.k.a. Stefan Balazs or Balázs Istvan.  In France his name is usually pronounced “Balash,” but the proper pronunciation should be “Balazh.”

  See F. Aubin, “Étienne Balazs (1905-1963).  Un destin tragique,” in an as-yet untitled volume dedicated to the memory of Étienne Balazs being edited by Pierre-Étienne Will.

  F. Aubin, “In Memoriam: Walther Heissig,” Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines (EMSCAT) 36-37 (2005): 464-469.

  Jean Aubin (1927-1998), Le latin et l’astrolabe, tome III, Études inédites sur le règne de D. Manuel (1495-1521), édition posthume préparée d’après les papiers laissés par l’auteur, par Maria de Conceição Flores, Luís Filipe F.R.