The Han Kitab Authors 125
stitutive of the sort of shared Weltanschauung to which Elman
gestures.
Chinese Muslim scholars were active in a wide array of fields—
philology, bibliography, geography, translation, philosophy—that
were useful tools for exploring specifically Islamic knowledge, such
as ritual and law. They were not, however, in any sense distinctively
Muslim. In fact, such fields were most characteristic of the domi-
nant elite literati society at the time. Chinese Muslim scholars’
shared interest, the interest that brought them together as a school,
was thus based on a simultaneous “scholarliness” of a distinctly
Chinese sort and “Muslimness,” again of a distinctly Chinese sort—
one that placed its emphasis on scholarship. The Chinese Muslim
school thus, peculiarly, has as its starting point a filiation in Islam
but insists that Islam be viewed through the lenses of dominant
Chinese cultural categories.
The ways in which Chinese Muslim scholars coalesced into a
school are best traced through a prosopography of the producers
of Chinese Islamic scholarship—the authors of the texts of the Han
Kitab. Their embeddedness in a complex matrix of kinship, peda-
gogy, patronage, and geography, in combination with the interre-
latedness of their scholarly output and their cultural setting, show
with greater immediacy how the Chinese Islamic school grew out
of its educational system.
Providing Access to Foreign Knowledge:
Translators and Translations
As we have seen, translation from Arabic and Persian was one of
the most important activities of the authors of the Han Kitab. Al-
most all the authors discussed here engaged in translation. Some
translated short passages of the Qur’an or of other texts in order to
incorporate them into their own works; others, particularly in ear-
lier years, translated entire books, mostly Sufi texts in circulation
throughout the educational network.
In two of his important multivolume works on Islamic ritual
and philosophy, Liu Zhi provided long lists of books and sources
in Arabic and Persian. Together there are almost seventy items on