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.
