Eric Schluessel (Assistant Professor, Department of History, George Washington University)

The Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī of Mullah Mūsa Sayrāmī (1836–1917) is celebrated as a monument of Uyghur literature and the preeminent Muslim history of nineteenth-century Xinjiang (East Turkestan). Yet Sayrāmī’s work is also a multilayered transcultural text that advances insightful observations of Chinese power and new theories about its workings. This talk places the Tārīkh-i Ḥamīdī into its social and cultural context of late-Qing Inner Asia, when a group of Confucian activists engaged in a civilizing project meant to incorporate this Muslim-majority borderland and its people into the Chinese ecumene.