Uncontrived Concord: The Eclectic Sources and Syncretic Theories of Liu Zhi, a Chinese Muslim Scholar

Abstract

Focusing on some of this most important writings, this article examines the diverse influences on the highly syncretic thought of Liu Zhi (ca. 1660-ca. 1730), a Muslim literatus of early Qing period (1644-1911) China, who wrote about Islam in classical Chinese as part of a canon known as the Han Kitāb. Yet, rather than subscribing to the simplistic notion that Chinese Muslims responded to the dominant Chinese culture around them by choosing between the limited options of ‘conflict or concord’, this study seeks to demonstrate that the harmonization effected by these intellectuals was a by-product of their own religio-cultural simultaneity. Chinese Muslim literati, epitomized by Liu Zhi, expressed thier distinct religious beliefs and cultural identities in a manner consonant with the dominant Confucian ideology, precisely because they resided simultaneously in both worlds of their dual heritage. Liu Zhi's work represents the most systematic and sophisticated attempt to harmonize Islam with Chinese thought and provide a glimpse at Chinese Islamic metaphysics. Liu Zhi found in Sufi theories a bridge between the religio-philosophical traditions of East and West. The most methodical scholar of the Han Kitāb, Liu Zhi's bibliographies reveal a significant debt to medieval Sufi literature. Other references to both Chinese and Islamic sources remian obliquely embedded in his writing. A study of these various references provides a sense of the eclectic sources of his syncretism. In particular, it reveals traces of the Ibn ʿArabī school of thought and waḥdat al-wujūd (Oneness of Being) theory that suffuse Liu Zhi's writings, alongside Neo-Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist concepts that approximate mystical ideas long debated in the Islamic world.