148 The Han Kitab Authors
Confucian thought^76 and can be translated as Reason and Principle
of Islam. At heart, the work limns Islamic understandings of God
by placing them in a comparative context; the theology—and the
God—outlined by Liu are compared to all other theologies current
in Liu’s own cultural context. Thus, for example, Liu makes a
comparison between the Daoist concept of wu 無 (non-being), the
Buddhist concept of kong 空 (emptiness), and the Chinese Islamic
concept of Zhenyi 真一 (the True and One).
Liu’s interaction with his surrounding culture was not limited
to conceptual comparisons. He included in the Tianfang xingli sec-
tions on biology, geography, and astronomy and their bases in Is-
lamic doctrine. This was Liu’s attempt to produce a Chinese Islam-
ic version of the late Ming/ early Qing genre of encyclopedic
classification of knowledge, itself linked in part to the Kangxi
{Qianlong?} emperor’s sponsorship of the cataloguing and classifi-
cation of all book-based knowledge.^77
Since my purpose here is to focus specifically on the networks
of learning that gave rise to Chinese Muslim scholarship, any
lengthy discussion of the philosophical and theological content of
Liu’s work is out of place. For present purposes, however, the
comparative aspect of Liu’s work warrants brief attention. Quite
aside from its philosophically and theologically noteworthy aspects,
Liu’s interest in reading Islam against Buddhism and Daoism shows
him in dialogue not simply with Chinese Muslim scholarship but
with the literary traditions and genres of other Chinese communi-
ties as well. Liu was convinced that Islam was relevant to all read-
ers, not just Muslims. In fact he tried on at least two occasions to
draw the Qing court’s attention to his works.
We see just how flexible and broad some Chinese Muslim schol-
ars could take their intellectual community to be. As Liu wrote: “I
am indeed a scholar of Islamic learning. However, it is my opinion
that if one does not read [exhaustively] the classics, the histories,
and the doctrines of the hundred schools, then Islamic scholarship
—————
76. Bai Shouyi comments that one point of difference between Wang Daiyu
and Liu Zhi is their attitude toward Neo-Confucianism. Wang was hostile,
whereas Liu was profoundly influenced by it; see HRZ (Qingdai), p. 62.
77. See Elman, From Philosophy to Philology, p. 157.