The Han Kitab Authors 151
Each of these two works—the Tianfang xingli and the Tianfang
dianli—includes a bibliography of the sources used by Liu in the
course of his writing; these lists further clarify our understanding
of the ways in which Chinese Muslim scholarship was invariably
produced in an ongoing conversation with earlier works and ideas.
The list in the Tianfang xingli cites forty books; that in the Tian-
fang dianli forty-five, for a total of sixty-seven different titles (nine-
teen entries in the two lists overlap).
To quote Paul Pelliot, the lists are in fact a “catalogue of almost
all Muslim titles existing in China around the 1700 s.”^86 Leslie and
Wassel, who have made use of a number of different editions of
Liu’s books and compared the different researches regarding the
lists, provide the fullest, most accurate, and most reliable recon-
struction of original titles listed.^87 The combined list covers an ar-
ray of fields and topics. In addition to the Qur’an, it contains stan-
dard Sunni Hanafite (one of the four schools in Islamic Law) texts
on law and ritual; a number of Sufi texts (mainly of the Kubrawiy-
ya sect, but also of the Naqshbandiyya); biographies of Muham-
mad and of Sufi shaykhs; and Arabic texts on philosophy, poetry,
astronomy, and geography.^88
Liu’s third important book is a biography of the Prophet Mu-
hammad, the Tianfang zhisheng shilu 天方至聖實綠 (The veritable
records of the Most Sagely of Islam). It is based mainly on a Per-
sian translation of a biography of the Prophet—Tarjuma i Maulud i
Mustafa—written by Sa’id bin-Mas’ud al-Kazaruni (d. 1357 ).^89 Liu
—————
86. Quoted in Leslie and Wassel, “Arabic and Persian Sources Used by Liu
Chih,” p. 78. Leslie and Wassel suggest that in fact there were more Arabic and
Persian books in China at the time.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., p. 104.
89. Leslie, Islamic Literature in Chinese, p. 49. The only “Western” work on
this text is an unpublished dissertation prepared for the department of Arabic Lit-
erature of Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, by Luttfi Mahmood Mansour. Man-
sour provides a short history of the text and a full punctuated and annotated ver-
sion of it. According to Mansour, the original version was written in Arabic by
Sa’id al-Din Muhammad Ibn Mas‘ud al-Kazaruni (d. 1357 ), a Persian Sufi scholar.
The author’s son ‘Afif translated the text into Persian in 1383 and gave it the title
mentioned by Liu Zhi. The book was never published but circulated in manu-