Sufi Texts in Chinese – The Heritage of Sufism vol III – Sachiko Murata

The Prophet is reported to have said, “Seek knowledge, even unto China.” However, Chinese Muslims, who were already in China, had to seek knowledge from Persia, or at least from Persian texts. Islam entered China early on in Islamic history, though clear historical records do not begin appearing until around the fourth/tenth century. No one knows to what extent the Islamic presence in China derives from immigrants or from Chinese converts to Islam. In any case, many of the immigrants gradually became indistinguishable from the native Chinese, and a large population of Muslims who considered themselves Chinese became established. Until the seventeenth century, however, it seems that Islamic learning was transmitted mainly in Persian and Arabic (and perhaps Turkic as well), since we have no Chinese texts on Islam written by Chinese Muslims before this time. Historians agree on two basic points—that Chinese Muslims began to write on Islam in Chinese.

In order to grasp the full significance of this Chinese writing, we need to remember that China provides us with the only pre-modern case in which Muslims wrote in the language of a major, pre-existing intellectual tradition. Only the Indian, Buddhist, Greek, and Judaeo-Christian traditions could compare with China in terms of richness and sophistication, but Muslims never had to express themselves in the languages of those traditions. This makes the Chinese example a sort of precursor of what some Muslims have been trying to accomplish today in Western languages, and the evidence seems to suggest that the Chinese Muslims were much more successful.

Sachiko Murata is Associate Professor of Comparative Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought, also published by SUNY Press.