The Seventeenth-Century Context

In the Ming period (1368–1644), Chinese Muslim writers began to explain their ancestral religion of Islam in the language and conceptual schema of their contemporary Chinese culture. That is, they participated fully in two literate, self-confident and, at least potentially, exclusive cultures, so they had to produce a textual justification that allowed them to be legitimate insiders in both. This will be a constant theme in this book, for the same impulse has continued to motivate Chinese Muslim intellectuals to think and write for the past 400 years. As Zvi Ben-Dor Benite put it, these early scholars engaged in ‘the foundation and distribution of a specifically Chinese form of Islamic knowledge, one that claimed to be compatible with – indeed, a subset of – Confucian knowledge and learning’. They thus created the first coherent body of Chinese texts articulating a Sino-Islamic intellectual history, embodying both the simultaneity and inherent tensions of their dual identities.

This evolution blossomed in the tumultuous seventeenth century, as the Ming state weakened and collapsed under the pressure of domestic rebellion and foreign invasion. In an atmosphere of widespread anti-foreign, especially anti-Manchu, hostility and action, the authors of these ‘Chinese [Islamic] books’ (Ch. Han Ar. kitāb) walked a fine line between, on the one hand, avoiding an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous alterity, and, on the other hand, preserving their Islamic commitments from excessive or distorting accretions from Chinese culture. From the earliest extant Han kitāb text, Wang Daiyu's Zhengjiao zhenquan (1642) to the translations of Wu Zixian a few decades later,6 the first published books in this genre probed the possibilities of expressing accurate Islamic meaning in the conventional language of learned Chinese discourse. Ma Zhu (1640–after 1710), the subject of this chapter, followed in the footsteps of these early writers, both translating selected passages from Arabic and Persian sources and using literary Chinese to formulate his own systematic understanding of Islam, maximally compatible with the norms of his Chinese culture.

One of the most intractable translation problems for Chinese Muslim intellectuals lay in the Mediterranean conviction, shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, that God had created the physical cosmos from nothing (Lat. creatio ex nihilo), and that God remained in a position outside that cosmos, filling it with divine presence, but nonetheless utterly different from visible physical reality.