168 Muhammad and His Dao
Confucius in the East.”^8 But whereas Standaert’s observation is
based on his extension of Yang Tingyun’s argument (and it appears
justified), many Chinese Muslim scholars explicitly declared that
Muhammad was himself a sage. In so doing, these scholars placed
Muhammad squarely within the ideological and temporal spectrum
of Confucian thought. He and his teachings were not merely har-
monious with Confucianism; they were an essential component of
the totality of the Dao.
Finally, whereas Chinese Christians were concerned with align-
ing their “foreign” teaching with Chinese thought, Chinese Mus-
lims sought to demonstrate that their thought was not, in fact, for-
eign at all. Again, the Christian and Muslim strategies are similar
but differ in degree and intensity. Chinese Christian scholars cre-
ated a space for (foreign) Christian thought alongside (indigenous)
Confucianism, but Chinese Muslim scholars made room for Mu-
hammad, and thus for Islam as a whole, within Confucian tradition
itself. Christianity always was understood as foreign, even by Chi-
nese Christians themselves; in contrast, Chinese Muslim literati
perceived their Dao, despite its origins in the West (西方or 西域),
as ultimately Chinese. Islam itself was western, but the scholarly
tradition of which they were a part was distinctly Chinese.
A number of reasons lie behind such differences; many of these
deserve lengthy study in their own right and cannot be discussed
here at any length. They include the history of Christian mission-
ary activity in China; the very fact that the proselytizers were
Europeans underscored the imported nature of Christianity. Like
many of his colleagues, Matteo Ricci, for example, pitched himself
to would-be converts as specifically foreign. As one recent study
suggests, Ricci and others purposely promoted themselves as
“Western Sages,” thus fitting themselves into a category “already
prepared for [them] in the Chinese intellectual arena.”^9 Obviously
“Western Sages” or “Western scholars” 西儒would initially have
been a useful categorization for Christian missionaries; by using
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8. Standaert, Yang Tingyun, p. 201.
9. Qiong Zhang, “Cultural Accommodation or Intellectual Colonization?,”
p. 74.