106 Self-Perception and Identity
converts him. Chinese Muslims knew very well, it seems, how to
position themselves in stories they told about themselves.
Zhao’s inclusion of the vignette about Ma Minglong and the of-
ficials is not incidental to his purpose. The story circulated widely
throughout the various institutions of the Muslim educational sys-
tem. It may well have been historically accurate. But its factual ac-
curacy is perhaps the least of its many important features. The ac-
count of Ma’s dialogue with the officials is, at heart, a tale about
Zhao’s understanding of the relationship between the learned Mus-
lim Chinese community and the Confucian literary elite. It also
constitutes precisely the sort of anecdotal material that Chamber-
lain has argued to be a vital, if less strictly “factual,” source of in-
formation for those working with biographies and genealogies.
Zhao, writing several decades after the events he described, was
clearly not limiting his information to the incontrovertibly factual.
He put words into the mouths of his characters and his richly de-
tailed and theatrical description of the enraptured officials leaning
forward, intent on hearing Ma’s explication of Islam, invites us to
be eyewitnesses of the event. Yet Zhao was certainly not trying to
fool his readers into thinking that he had firsthand knowledge of
the events he described. The “truth” of Zhao’s account lies in its
“plausibility,” to use Chamberlain’s term. For Zhao, as for his
community, the vignette tells the story not simply of one individ-
ual’s encounter with specific Confucians but also—and more im-
portant—of the relationship between the Muslim Chinese and
Confucian literary establishments. It was a relationship that inhab-
ited the shared cultural ground provided by the category of the
“literatus.” From the standpoint of Chinese Muslim scholars, such
categories were elastic and provided the possibility for inclusion
within elite Chinese society.
Genealogy and Chinese
Muslim Literati Identity
Aside from its factual and anecdotal content, Zhao’s text itself—in
its literary form and through its very existence—provides other in-
dications of Chinese Muslim scholarly self-perception in the late
seventeenth century. Having evaluated the contents of Zhao Can’s