Self-Perception and Identity 99
a western book on inheritance law, the Fei la yi te,^53 it was never
studied or taught” 初茲土有費喇意特乃西域分受家財之經亦未
傳講. Feng studied this book with great concentration and care for
many days until he understood its meaning completely and with
clarity (先生潛心細閱研究多日竟洞悉其意; JXCP, p. 75 ). Feng
then met with a visiting Arabic-speaking Muslim scholar, to whom
he demonstrated his knowledge of Islamic law. The guest praised
Feng, declaring that he was the first among the scholars of al-Sin
(曰雖呢[中國之譯也]學者之第一流也; JXCP, pp. 75 – 76 ). (Appar-
ently out of a desire to transmit the words of the guest faithfully,
Zhao used the Arabic name for China, al-Sin, in its transliterated
form. For readers to whom the term is unfamiliar, he explained
that it meant “China.”)^54
The scholarly attributes so praised by Zhao and other Chinese
Muslim chroniclers were convertible into social capital of various
sorts. Chinese Muslim scholars functioned within three different
social spheres: the Chinese Muslim education system and its im-
mediate constituency; the world of western Islamic scholarship and
intellectual tradition; and the Han Chinese intellectual and cultural
tradition. Chinese Muslim scholars existed at the interstices of all
three and understood themselves as participants in all of them. In-
deed, their distinct identity was predicated on the ways in which
the Chinese Muslim literatus, in his very person, blurred the dis-
tinctions among these various cultural and social categories. Schol-
arship and the status of a scholar gave social access to, and gained
social validation from, the Chinese Muslim constituency and from
the western Islamic intellectual establishment.
What, then, of the third social milieu from which Chinese Mus-
lim scholars sought recognition and validation? Scholarship, in this
instance, too, was the central means through which Chinese Mus-
—————
53. The term fei la yi te does not refer to a specific book. My guess is that it is a
transliteration of fara’id, a generic term for Islamic inheritance and property law.
A collection of treatises on the subject entitled Farai’d by Sirag al-Din Muhammad
(b. Muhammad al-Sagawandi; fl. late thirteenth century), could be the one, but
there is no way to be sure.
54. Zhao (JXCP, p. 76 ) concludes the story by adding that subsequently the
book has been taught in the education network (蓋費喇意特自先生創思而傳
之也).