Chinese Heirs to Muhammad: Writing Islamic History in Early Modern China by J. Lilu Chen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chinese Heirs to Muhammad: Writing Islamic History in Early Modern China by J. Lilu Chen Kaveh Hemmat (bio) J. Lilu Chen. Chinese Heirs to Muhammad: Writing Islamic History in Early Modern China. Modern Muslim World 7. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2020. xiii, 180 pp. Hardcover $114.95, isbn 978-1-4632-3925-1. Scholarship on Islam in East Asia is a relatively new field, which has nonetheless made important progress in understanding intellectual life in the late Ming and Qing periods, and the history of Muslim communities in regions from Yunnan and Quanzhou to the Gansu corridor and Korea. Benefiting from the publication of two major collections of sources on Islam in China, the Qingzhen dadien 清真大典 and the Huizu diancang quanshu 回族典藏全书, J. Lilu Chen makes an important contribution to this body of work with a focused study of the theories of time and history of Muslim authors in eastern China and Yunnan. Chen focuses on four Hui writers: Liu Zhi 劉智, writing in 1724; Lan Xu 藍煦 and Li Huanyi 李煥乙, who wrote in the 1850s and 1874, respectively; and Ma Yunhua 馬雲華, who fled Yunnan following the massacres of Hui Muslims in 1873, then returned as an old man during the Republican period and revised a genealogy of the Ma family. The overall project of the book is to show how the chronological and cosmological systems of Liu Zhi were developed and expanded by Lan Xu, and how later writers used these systems to write histories of their communities that were simultaneously histories of Islam and histories of China. Chen begins chapter 1 with an analysis of a biography of Muhammad by Liu Zhi, the most famous and prolific Muslim author of late imperial China, titled Veritable Records of the Utmost Sage of Arabia (Tianfang zhisheng shilu 天方至琞實錄). Liu Zhi draws on the theories and terminology developed by Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), which had become a major component of Sufi thought. Liu Zhi placed Muhammad’s life within a cosmic-historical frame beginning with Adam and continuing to the present. For Liu Zhi, Muhammad had a physical reality as well as a metaphysical reality, in which he is the starting point and end point of four systems: the generational system (shi tong 世統), state system (guo tong 國統), religious system (dao tong 道統), and metaphysical system (hua tong 化統). In the state system, Muhammad inherits governance from the rulers of antiquity, beginning with Adam, the first ruler, continuing through Persian and Byzantine kings. Muhammad is the last emperor, and after his death the state system is transmitted through worthies (xian 賢). The metaphysical system positions Muhammad as the origin from which all phenomena emanate and assume differentiating characteristics, such as yin-yang, the five elements, and the divisions between plants, animals, and humans, culminating in Muhammad. Muhammad is thus both positioned within these systems of transmission, and also encompasses all of them. [End Page 256] While Liu Zhi’s work is treated by previous studies as the culmination of the development of Islamic thought in Classical Chinese, Chen devotes much of Chinese Heirs to Lan Xu (1813–c. 1880), who drew on Liu Zhi’s thought to develop a historical vision that integrated Islamic and Chinese mythic and sacred histories. Lan Xu enjoyed a successful government career and authored a number of works, including a commentary on the Yijing as well as Islamic works including Tianfang erya 天方尔雅, an encyclopedia of Persian terms for cosmology, landscape, flora, and fauna, and The Upright Learning of Arabia (Tianfang zhengxue 天方正學), which summarizes what he considered to be the most essential Islamic knowledge. The Upright Learning organizes time and cosmology around the haqq, an Arabic term that is a name of God referring to truth and ultimate reality, which Lan Xu both transliterates as han ge 罕格 and employs interchangeably with zhen yi 真一, “true Oneness.” The haqq, for Lan Xu, is independent of time and generates the systems and cycles that dictate earthly life, with the first division of Yin and Yang producing the Muhammadan light, which precedes all creation and is the link between the haqq and created beings. Lan Xu articulates a cosmological system that divides the lifespan of the universe into twelve parts, of which the last nine encompass human...