164 Muhammad and His Dao
mosque, for instance, hints strongly in this direction. Through the
mechanisms of scholarly production and study and by qualifying
as literati or scholars, Chinese Muslim intellectuals were able to
come to an understanding of themselves as Chinese.
What, though, of the other half of their identity? If the Chinese
Muslims deployed a sophisticated—if unselfconscious—strategy for
“self-encompassment” into the dominant Chinese discourse, the
way in which they connected the Chinese Muslim tradition as a
whole to Chinese culture is just as striking. It is a strategy best re-
vealed by examining the ways in which Chinese Muslim scholars
read Muhammad into Chinese scholarly tradition by arguing that
he was the first link in the chain of transmission of knowledge,
which they themselves cultivated and developed through scholar-
ship. Just as Chinese Muslim scholars understood themselves as
Chinese by free application of the categories of elite Chinese soci-
ety, they also understood their tradition itself and, most specifi-
cally, its founder through available categories. Thus, Muhammad is
portrayed in Chinese Muslim writings as a “sage” as well as a “righ-
teous ruler”—central categories developed and recognized by Con-
fucian scholarship.^1
The same dynamic has been explored by scholarship on Chris-
tians in China, most notably that of David Mungello in The Forgot-
ten Christians of Hangzhou and Nicholas Standaert in Yang Ting-
yun: Confucian and Christian in Late Ming China.^ Unlike most
scholarship concerned with the history of Christianity in China,
these two works focus on Chinese Christians rather on the Jesuits
and other missionaries. Both are, in different ways, concerned with
the question of how Chinese Christians viewed themselves vis-à-vis
the broader Chinese society.^2
—————
- In this context, the Chinese term shengren 聖人 is usually translated as “sage”
or “holy man.” It was first translated by the Jesuit father Matteo Ricci as santo and
used to describe the Christian saints; see Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism,
pp. 69 , 94. However, translating shengren as “sage” is more accurate in the case of
the Chinese Muslim Muhammad, since he embodied the attributes of wise politi-
cal rule and judgment associated with the term. Muhammad was depicted by Chi-
nese Muslims as more sagely than holy in the Western religious sense of that word. - To these two studies should be added a more recent one by Wang Xiaochao,
Christianity and Imperial Culture.