Before the twentieth century, Persian learning was very important in the madrasa (jingtang) curriculum of China. According to tradition, Hu Dengzhou arranged the Thirteen Classics (shisan-ben jing) in the late Ming, seven books in Arabic and six in Persian. After mastering Arabic, compulsory for citing and understanding the Qur’ān, students learned Persian to pursue the path of human completion, to reach directly the true essence of existence, God. The Persian curriculum stage usually proved to be the most difficult, for it took more than ten years for students to master all of those thirteen texts in foreign languages. The madrasa students and ahongs spoke Chinese in its many varieties, but most were illiterate in Chinese characters.

In recent years, scholars have demonstrated that ‘traditional’ Islam in China, usually called Old Teaching (laojiao) or the Traditional Way (gedimu, from Ar. qadīm), was profoundly affected by the concept of ‘unity of being’ (wahdat al-wujūd), inherited from the philosophical and ontological discussions of Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), Jāmī and other Sufi thinkers. The ‘unity of being’ was a universalist Islamic explanation of all varieties of existence as flowing from one single divine essence. Before the twentieth century, wahdat al-wujūd thinking prevailed throughout the Islamic world, including Africa, India and South East Asia. Islam in China was no exception.

In modern times, however, the madrasa curriculum in China has changed gradually with the expansion of Islamic modernist and reformist movements, and Persian learning slowly disappeared from the curriculum, with the exception of particular villages in North China. This chapter explores why Persian learning was discarded in the process of secularisation of Islam in China – in the context of educational reform and Japanese imperial domination – and why traditional Persian learning has been preserved only in places such as Tianmucun (or Muzhuangzi) in Tianjin and Ding Zhuangzi and Cao Zhuangzi in Hebei.

Madrasa Education in Contemporary China

As an introduction, let us consider Islamic education in contemporary China. Nowadays, very few madrasas anywhere in China maintain the traditional learning, including Persian learning. In almost all the mosques that call themselves ‘traditional’ (gedimu), everywhere in China, they teach only Arabic as a religious language. Beginning in 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Anti-Religion Campaign forced the end of both Arabic and Persian learning.