170 Muhammad and His Dao
gaged in a reconciliatory endeavor.^11 When Chinese Muslims made
use of Chinese categories to understand their tradition, they were
instead demonstrating what they took as the flexibility of cultural
categories, Muslim and Chinese—categories that to them were in
fact so flexible that there was no need for reconciliation. The Mus-
lims themselves were concerned with interpreting themselves and
their tradition against the backdrop of Chinese culture, as a means
of understanding the “reality” of being both Muslim and Chinese.
Christian Chinese, newcomers to a faith, on the other hand, had to
reassure themselves, and the society of which they were a part, that
their aims were not in opposition to those of the majority.
Perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the dif-
ferent Christian and Muslim interpretations of passages such as
that of Lu Jiuyuan was the presence among Muslims of the indige-
nous educational apparatus. The widespread and complex Chinese
Muslim educational system gave Chinese Muslim thinkers a pow-
erful sense of themselves as members of a community of knowl-
edge, tied together by familial, geographic, and pedagogical ties,
which behaved according to the norms of Confucian literati soci-
ety. To put it simply, they saw themselves as part of an established
“native” school because they could. Their loyalty as Muslims to
Muhammad’s teachings was expressed and reinforced through
Confucian norms and values. This loyalty to Muhammad’s teach-
ing was not a choice of faith, but a matter of genealogical—familial
and pedagogical—heritage to which, as good Confucians, they were
committed. Furthermore, whereas Christians had to rely on the
content and meaning of their teachings to find compatibilities with
the dominant intellectual society, Muslims could depend also on
the form their teaching took. This form—the educational network
itself—was one that further underscored their sense of themselves
as true members of Chinese literati culture.
The belief in Chinese tradition that the transmission of knowl-
edge relied on a series of sages allowed for the incorporation of
Chinese Muslim scholarly tradition. Moreover, the patterning of
—————
11. See, among others, Rule, K’ung-Tzu or Confucius; Mungello, The Forgotten
Christians of Hangzhou.