In this article I revise the conventional account of the contestation over Islamic reform in late Qing and Republican China. I argue that previous scholarship has overlooked important similarities between so-called “reformists” or “Yihewani” and “traditionalists” or “Gedimu.” Based on an analysis of several texts and their exposition of the concept of bid‘a, I show that scholars associated with opposite sides of this divide in the early twentieth century shared a legalistic understanding of the shari‘a as a system of categories for classifying human action; and that this classificatory conception of the shari‘a differed from the practice-centered approach reflected in earlier Chinese Islamic works.

Islamic writings by Chinese Muslim scholars first attracted the attention of European researchers in the nineteenth century. Intermittently since then, the Islamic thought in these writings, expressed in the terminology and phrases of Chinese traditional thought, has been studied not only by European and American researchers but also Chinese and Japanese ones. The focus of such studies has generally been on elucidating the substantial influence of Chinese traditional thought on the Islamic thought of Chinese Muslim scholars, or on the relationship between Islam and Chinese traditional thought in Chinese Islamic writings, investigated either out of a historiographical concern for how Islam became established in China, or else from a philosophical concern to investigate an example of the “dialogue of civilizations”.