Muhammad and His Dao 171
the Chinese Muslim educational system with its complex links be-
tween scholars in different locations and generations was imitative
of such notions of the transmission of knowledge. It is in the con-
text of this network that the depiction of Muhammad as a sage had
its strongest resonances.
Muhammad, the Chinese Sage
The portrayal of Muhammad as a sage or righteous ruler accom-
plished two significant things. First, it made Muhammad a part of
Chinese tradition and rendered him a culturally intelligible figure
in the interpretive categories of Han society. Again, as Standaert
points out, this was, to an extent, a strategy also used by Chinese
Christian thinkers to make sense of Jesus. Second, the depiction of
Muhammad as a sage or righteous ruler rendered him not merely
an acceptable object of study but a necessary one. Islam thus be-
came the study of “the Dao of Muhammad,” one component of the
Dao with which all Chinese scholars were concerned and hence a
legitimate component of late imperial Chinese intellectual dis-
course.
Islam, then, was viewed not as a foreign knowledge “compatible
with” Chinese knowledge but as part of knowledge itself. The ini-
tially surprising fact that Chinese Muslim intellectuals never por-
trayed Islam as a religion of revelation becomes entirely logical in
light of this view of Muhammad. Muhammad, rather than being
the means of transmission of the divine Word, is instead a “sage”—
the original sage. Chinese Muslim scholars and teachers have as
their duty the ongoing transmission and development (or cultiva-
tion) of the Dao first taught by the founder of Islam. In short, the
quintessential category of the Muslim world—the prophet—is in
the Chinese Muslim instance converted into the quintessential
category of China’s intellectual elite—the sage.
In the preface to Kelimo jie克里默解 (Explication of Kalām;
dated 1631 ), Zhang Junshi briefly discussed the origins of Islam, of
its founder, and, most significant, Muhammad’s status as “sage.”
He opened with a general statement regarding sagehood: “The
sages of Southern and Northern Seas have the same mind and also
have the same principle” 南北海之聖人有同心亦有同理. Zhang