The Han Kitab Authors 117
not something he considered “Chinese,” and its exploitative uses
and abuses of Confucianism (a “real” Chinese cultural product)
were to be mistrusted.
Not all missionaries were hostile to Islam, but all shared Pal-
ladii’s view that it was fundamentally foreign. The Protestant Isaac
Mason (fl. early twentieth century) devoted most of his life to mis-
sionary activity among the Chinese Muslims and published nu-
merous short articles on them in journals dedicated to missionary
work among Muslims around the world. Among his articles was a
bibliography of the Han Kitab and other Chinese Muslim litera-
tures. Mason listed 214 works, dating from the seventeenth century
to the 1920 s.^8 Mason, like Palladii, dated the rise of Chinese Mus-
lim literature to the seventeenth century. He, too, found this
strange, given that Muslims had been living in China for several
centuries. His bland explanation for this long period of silence was
that Chinese Muslims had been “preparing” themselves in some
oblique way for scholarship and now wrote perhaps in response to
some “difficulty”: “[In the seventeenth century] some of the writ-
ers took up their tasks after much preparations and with a sense of
duty which enabled them to surmount many difficulties.”^9
It is remarkable that both Palladii and Mason focused on what
they presumed to be the intention of the Han Kitab scholars—a de-
sire to convert the Chinese or to write an Islamic apologia. In one
sense, this view is quite understandable, since this is what Christian
missionaries themselves were doing in China; the representatives of
a competing monotheistic religion could only be in China for the
same reason. However, the focus on Muslim intentions led these
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anity. In this respect Palladii and Vasil’ev were not alone: all Western literature on
Chinese Muslims, from the Jesuits to the 1930 s, was motivated by Christian con-
cerns of different sorts.
8. Most of the texts listed in Mason’s bibliography date from the twentieth
century. The journals in question, Moslem World, Chinese Repository, Chinese Re-
corder, and especially the Friends of Moslems, published frequent reports about
Chinese Muslims and about missionary work among them. Of all writers, Isaac
Mason stands out as the most prolific. Mason studied the various Chinese transla-
tions of the Qur’an and translated the biography of Muhammad by Liu Zhi (see
below).
9. Mason, “Notes on Chinese Mohammedan Literature,” p. 174.