A glossary of Chinese Islamic terms

China - with 20 million Muslims - is also one of the world s more populous Islamic countries.

Over half of China s Muslims are the Hui, a people found in western China (particularly Ningsia province) and descended from Islamic merchants, craftsman, scholars and soldiers who came to China from Persia and Central Asia between the 7th and 13th centuries.

Over the centuries, the original Arabic-based Islam of the Hui has absorbed a proportion of Chinese words, often concepts borrowed from Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

This work is the most comprehensive to date, taking terms from a wide variety of local gazetteers and archives, newspapers, books and periodicals.

It is also the first to fully match the Chinese term (stated in Chinese script and pinyin) to its Arabic or Persian counterpart (stated in Arabic, script with Latin transcription).