Introduction

While scholars have investigated the impact of Arabic and Persian sources on the development of Chinese textual scholarship on Islam, we still lack scholarly analysis of Chinese Muslims’ reaction to norms developed outside the Chinese legal framework. This chapter attempts to fill this void by exploring the commitment of Chinese Muslim scholars to the task of articulating and legitimising their own interpretation of Islamic law. Their efforts had the potential to separate Chinese Muslim legal thought from its Arabic and Persian matrix of origin. Thus, our core question will be, how did Chinese scholars justify and legitimate their own interpretation of Islamic law vis-à-vis the legal thinking of other areas of the Muslim world?

This chapter thus examines the implications of the legal discourse set forth in a Chinese primer for Muslims, the Tianfang sanzijing (Three Character Classic of Islam), regarding local notions of Islamic ‘legitimacy’ and ‘orthodoxy’. Credited to the author of the Norms and Rituals of Islam (Tianfang dianli), Liu Zhi (1662–c. 1736) (see Frankel, Chapter 2, and Petersen, Chapter 4, this volume), and animated by that book's purpose of reconciling Islamic law with the legal culture of the Qing, Liu's concise primer on the main tenets of Islam spoke to a broader audience than its textual antecedent. As argued below, the Muslim Sanzijing laid the ground for an independent development of Islamic law in the Chinese context, one that had the power to detach China from conventional Islamic jurisprudence outside its frontiers, while remaining consistent with the overarching legal principles of Sunni Islam.

The Muslim Sanzijing and its Audience