In the early twentieth century, modern transportation increased the convenience of contacts with the heartlands of the Islamic world sought by Muslims in China, and these took varied forms. Importing or printing religious works, including textbooks, for example, could bring authentic Islamic teachings to the Chinese Muslim community. Principal contributors to this cause were the Xiexing Company of Shanghai, the Chinese Muslim Publishing House of Shanghai and the Chengda Teachers’ College (Chengda Shifan Xuexiao) Publishing House in Beijing. Pilgrimage trips also became more viable, and some Muslim scholars, such as Imam Wang Kuan and Imam Wang Jingzhai, used these trips to study for short periods in the Middle East and to bring home books on Islamic studies. Finally, improved transportation naturally facilitated the dispatch of students to study in Islamic schools in the Middle East.

Such contacts allowed bilingual Muslim intellectuals to fulfil their selfproclaimed task of enlightening ordinary Muslims in China with accurate knowledge about Islam and the Islamic heartlands. But they had to select the information they chose to share and how they shared it, decisions that were based on many factors. In this chapter I use the story of three dozen Sino- Muslim students who studied at al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s to illustrate Sino-Muslims’ selective learning and transmission of Middle Eastern knowledge back to China.

Motivations for Sending Students to al-Azhar: The Muslim Modernist Vision

The first attempt to organise a group of Muslim students to study at al-Azhar resulted from the efforts of Muhammad Dazan, a visiting Afghan scholar at a mosque in Kunming, Yunnan, in the early 1930s. At the time, mosques in China occasionally hosted foreign Muslim scholars, such as Dazan, who taught the Qur'ān and other religious texts. In 1931, Dazan proposed that the Muslim Mingde Middle School in Kunming should send students to study at al-Azhar and wrote a letter of application to al-Azhar on the school's behalf. At his urging, the Mingde School then submitted a formal letter of its own. After two months, the school received a reply from al-Azhar agreeing to accept five students and to cover all expenses, including tuition, board, fees and stipends.

The Yunnan branch of the Chinese Islamic Progressive Association (CIPA), one of the most prominent institutions of the Islamic modernist programme, took on the responsibility for selecting the students.