Shifts in Sino-Islamic Discourse: Modelling religious authority through language and travel

Abstract

AbstractDuring the nineteenth century, many Sino-Muslim scholars were seeking a more robust relationship with their Arab co-religionists. The efforts of Ma Dexin 馬德新 (1794–1874) exemplify this shift to strengthen ties with the Muslim community outside China and situate Sino-Islamic scholarship in widespread Islamic discourses. Ma's writings provided Sino-Muslims with discursive and pragmatic tools for engaging a global Muslim community. For Ma, Muslim cooperation was negotiated through the means of religious education, which was enabled through travel and language. In this paper, I demonstrate how Ma Dexin modelled the importance of global connections of inter-Asian networks of religious learning by exemplifying the value of Middle Eastern travel and fluency in Arabic. I employ Ma's Chinese and Arabic written works in relation to those of Wang Daiyu 王岱輿 (circa1590–1658) and Liu Zhi 劉智 (circa1670–1724) to illustrate how he differed significantly from previous Sino-Muslim authors with regard to the use of Arabic within the Sino-Islamic intellectual tradition and in his emphatic urgings to perform the hajj pilgrimage. Finally, I briefly show how his divergent position was embraced, as exhibited through the efforts of one of his intellectual inheritors, Ma Lianyuan 馬聯元 (1841–1903).