Join Senior Coordinator of Education and Exhibits Alex Stewart and the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum in exploring his groundbreaking ethnographic research on northwestern China’s Muslim community.

This lecture traces the history of the Hui Muslim minority from small influxes of Muslim traders, soldiers, and diplomats in the Tang Dynasty to today’s Islamic revival. The Hui are the largest and most assimilated of China’s Muslim minorities.

Stewart’s dissertation explores how today’s Hui see themselves as members of both the Chinese nation and the global community of Muslims. Many Hui emphasize their universal Islamic identity through transnational revival movements like Salafiyya and Tablighi Jama’at, but they do so in a way that is apolitical and focused on individual study of scripture and self-cultivation rather than separatism or implementation of Islamic law on others.

Alex Stewart has been working on exhibits and education programs at the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum for nine years. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research in China and will receive his Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCSD in 2014.