Islamic law with Chinese characteristics

Under specific conditions, as this chapter proposes, cultural products deriving from distant peoples and geographies found novel social contexts and triggered cultural transformations vis-à-vis the status quo. Wolfgang Welsch addressed such dynamics by appropriating the concept of transculturality to explain the ‘puzzling form of cultures today’ (Welsch 1999). His conceptual application in an increasingly global context proved to be timely, especially for its utility in drawing attention to the proliferation of ‘hybrid’ cultural patterns. ¹ He concluded that transcultural dynamics were nothing new to history, convincingly questioning traditional anthropological notions of ‘single cultures’ (Welsch 1999). According to Welsch, cultures never function as closed systems of meanings. Viewing cultural boundaries as permeable to exogenous inputs accommodates the historical fluidity of cultural paradigms. But Welsch’s rejection of monadic or compartmentalizing definitions of culture falls short in that it risks denying any applicatory value to the concept. Neither transculturality’s validity as an abstract condition, nor its emphasis on fluidity, could justify a dismissal of culture’s instrumental role in the lexical texture of the very term.