The Qur’an and Identity in Contemporary Chinese Fiction

Abstract

How is it possible to comprehend and assess the impact of the Qur’an on the literary expressions of the Hui Chinese Muslims, who have been integrated into Sinophone and China’s multicultural community since the third/ninth century, when the first ‘translations’ of the Qur’an in Chinese made by non-Muslims from Japanese and English appeared only in 1927 and 1931, and that by a Muslim from Arabic in 1932? This paper looks at the ways in which the Qur’an is imagined, then embodied, in literary texts authored by two prizewinning Chinese Muslim authors. Huo Da (b. 1945) alludes to the Qur’an in her novel The Muslim’s Funeral (1982), and transforms its teachings into ritual performances of alterity in her saga of a Muslim family at the turn of the twentieth century. Zhang Chengzhi (b. 1948) involves himself in reconstructing the history of the Jahriyya Ṣūfī sect in China between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries in his only historical novel, A History of the Soul (1991), and invents an identity for Chinese Muslims based on direct knowledge of the sacred text and tradition.