Western Gods Meet in the East: Shapes and Contexts of the Muslim-Jesuit Dialogue in Early Modern...

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341244

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55 (2012) 517-546 brill.com/jesh

“Western Gods Meet in the East”:Shapes and Contexts of the Muslim-Jesuit Dialogue

in Early Modern China

Zvi Ben-Dor Benite*

AbstractThis essay is concerned with the possibilities and limitations of the Jesuit-Islamic dialogue in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It presents and discusses evidence for the interest of Chinese Muslims and Jesuits in each other almost from the outset, immedi-ately after Matteo Ricci’s arrival in China. Muslims read Jesuit material and even incorpo-rated it in their own works. Chinese Muslims were not, however, interested in Jesuit doctrines because of a shared monotheist faith: Chinese Muslims clearly saw Christianity not as a sister faith but as a Western one, and that was the main reason for their interest. With regard to the tendency to compare Jesuits and Chinese Muslims as two rivals compet-ing for success in the Chinese world of ideas, the Chinese Muslim scholars should be con-sidered not as rivals of the Jesuits but primarily as Chinese scholars engaging Jesuit knowledge and using it selectively for their own purposes.

Cet essai concerne les possibilités et les limites du dialogue jésuito-islamique dans la Chine des XVIe-XVIIe siècles. Il présente et discute les marques de l’intérêt réciproque que se por-tèrent musulmans chinois et jésuites dès les premiers temps de l’arrivée de Matteo Ricci en Chine. Les musulmans lisaient les matériaux jésuites et les incorporaient même dans leurs propres travaux. Cet essai montre toutefois que les musulmans chinois ne s’intéressaient pas aux doctrines jésuites au nom d’un monothéisme partagé. À l’évidence, les musulmans chinois ne considéraient pas le christianisme comme une foi « sœur » mais, comme une foi occidentale, et c’était là la principale raison de leur intérêt. Cet essai se veut également une critique de la tendance selon laquelle Jésuites et musulmans chinois auraient été des rivaux comparables se disputant le succès dans le monde chinois des idées. Il approche les lettrés

*) Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University ([email protected]). I thank the anonymous reader and co-editors of this special issue, as well as Professor Harriet Zurndorfer from Leiden University, for comments, criti-cisms, and suggestions. Research for this essay was funded by a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

518 Z. Ben-Dor Benite / JESHO 55 (2012) 517-546

chinois musulmans non comme des rivaux des jésuites mais, avant tout, comme des lettrés chinois se confrontant au savoir jésuite et l’utilisant sélectivement à leurs propres fins.

KeywordsIslam, China, Confucianism, Buddhism, Ricci, Heaven

I. Introduction

In 1607, when the second edition of his Catechismo—Tianzhu shiyi, or The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven—was issued, Matteo Ricci proudly reported that it was selling well in Nanjing, “where it is bought by, among others, many from the sect of the Saracens, for it seems to be consistent with their doctrines.” In another letter, written shortly thereafter, Ricci elaborated on the first, revealing that “someone has told me that the many of the Moorish faith, who live in this country, buy this book, for it seems to them that it speaks of God better than the books of China.”1

The Tianzhu shiyi, of which Ricci was so proud, introduced Tianzhu (the Lord of Heaven) to the Chinese and was written as a dialogue between a “Western scholar” (xishi) and a “Chinese scholar” (zhongshi). Both are loaded titles, and we shall return later to a discussion of the idea of “West-ern scholars,” and the “West” in general. As for the “Chinese scholars,” I follow Ricci and, for the sake of discussion, use the term in reference to the Jesuits’ Confucian, non-Muslim interlocutors.

From its title alone, it is clear that Ricci’s work sought to establish a link between “God” and the mysterious Chinese concept of deity known as “Tian” (Heaven). The depiction of God as the Lord of Heaven and the use the Chinese deity Tian as God’s central attribute (as the term Tianzhu explicitly suggests), was immensely significant. This locution, a blending of the early modern Catholic God with Confucian heaven was “the very heart of early Chinese Christianity”; indeed in the late Ming and early Qing periods, belief in Tianzhu was the main element in the emerging new

1) P.M. D’Elie, Fonti Ricciane: Documenti originali concernenti Matteo Ricci e la storia delle prime relazioni tra l’Europa e la Cina (1579-1615) (Rome: La Libreria Dello Stato, 1942): 1:179; the translation is based on Gernet’s translation with my minor amendments. J. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also M. Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (a Chinese-English ed. of T’ien-chu Shih-i), ed. Douglas Lancashire and P. Hu Kuo-chen, trans. E.J. Malatesta (Taipei: Institut Ricci, 1985); I use this Chinese-English edition throughout.

“Western Gods Meet in the East” 519

religion one could call monotheist Confucianism, and in “many treatises written by Jesuits and their converts [it was] the central, all important, theme.”2 The Muslim dialogue with Jesuit ideas was therefore based largely on what they read in this book by Ricci.

Ricci’s statements, the specifics of which we shall treat later, illustrate forcefully the way in which Muslims—that is, Chinese Muslims3—were part of numerous direct or indirect dialogues and exchanges that had been stirred by the presence of Jesuits in China since Matteo Ricci’s arrival. Jesuits played a central role in these exchanges, mainly through dialogue with Confucians and the literate elite. Muslim elites played a role in this too, albeit indirectly, as hinted in Ricci’s comment. Moreover, Jesuits observed China’s “Moors” and wrote about the Muslims they found in China, just as they wrote about Jews and other groups. In this framework, Ricci’s excited statements seem self-explanatory. It is logical that Muslims, fellow monotheists who, like the Jesuits themselves, were survivors of the theological wilderness that China represented, would read with great inter-est a treatise in Chinese about the “true meaning of the Lord of Heaven”—the God of Abraham whom they shared with the Jesuits. Yet, an overview of the history of Chinese Islamic thought and the circumstances within which it developed require us to think beyond the commonalities in the concepts of divinity. A more historically accurate approach to the question requires an examination of Chinese Islam on its own terms before turning to the question of its dialogue with Jesuit theology in China. We must also remember that the encounter between Jesuits and Muslims in China was bi-directional and that each side viewed the other in different terms. Finally, this essay argues that we must not view the Muslim-Jesuit encoun-ter as an isolated instance of cultural exchange. Rather, I will argue that Chinese Muslims approached Jesuit theology as part of the whole range of Chinese responses to it. In other words, in order to produce a historically grounded understanding of the encounter between Jesuits and Muslims theologians in China we must situate it in the broader Chinese context. One must also explore the ways in which each side viewed the other.

2) E.J. Zürcher, “ ‘In the Beginning’: 17th-Century Chinese Reaction to Christian Crea-tionis,” in Time and Space in Chinese Culture, ed. C. Huang and E.J. Zürcher (Leiden: Brill, 1995): 143.3) In this essay I use “Chinese Muslims” to refer specifically and exclusively to Chinese-speaking Muslims, the group known today as the Hui.


Matteo Ricci was not interested in Islam, at least not as much as he was interested in other things he encountered in China. Indeed, even his most substantial descriptions of Chinese Islam seem to be second-hand. Ricci testifies only once to have spoken directly with a Muslim. This sole encoun-ter came in 1602, when he met in Beijing a group of foreign Muslim merchants; one of them told him that there were in the northwest some “white men” who seemed to be Christian. This piqued Ricci’s interest, and he attempted, unsuccessfully, to organize an expedition. (Later on, it was discovered that those people were Nestorians.)4 This is the only evidence we have of direct contact between Ricci and Chinese Muslims while he was in China, and, even in this case, the issue that concerned the great dialo-gist, as Ricci is remembered today, was not “doctrine” and dialogue about it with a fellow monotheist, but the possible presence of white Christians in northwestern China. Ricci apparently never spoke with Chinese Mus-lims, at least, not about Islam. We can safely assume that had he done so, we would read about it in his diaries and writings, just as we read there about his encounter with the Chinese Jew Ai, who is specifically sum-moned to meet with Ricci and carefully interrogated by him and who is detailed in the diaries at great length.5

As Ricci points out, the Chinese language speaks of the “Huihui of the three teachings [or laws]” (sanjiao Huihui): Nestorian Christians in China were referred to as “Huihui of the character ‘10’ (the cross),” and Jews were known as “Huihui who reject the sinew” in reference to the Jewish way of slaughtering which removes the part of the lag touched by the angel of God during the battle with Jacob (Genesis 32:29-30).6 Yet Ricci gives some attention to the “Saraceni Maumetanni,” as he occasionally refers to Mus-lims, sometimes according them a greater significance than might at first meet the eye. For instance, the second image in his famous essay on mne-monic strategies, the Xiguo jifa, written in Nanjing in 1596, is centered on a Huihui (i.e., Muslim) woman.7

4) Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984): 120. D’Elie, Fonti: 2:140.5) D’Elie, Fonti Ricciane: 2:316-8.6) D’Elie, Fonti Ricciane: 1:113. The terms “Hui” and “Huihui” were used interchangeably in reference to Muslims, Nestorian Christians and Jews. For the most part “Hui” or “Hui-hui” were used for Muslims. I am using both here according to context. 7) M. Ricci (Li Madou), “Xiguo jifa,” in M. Ricci, Li Madou Zhongwen zhuyi ji (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2001): 141-68 (quotation on p. 146); see also Spence, Memory Palace: 93-4.


For their part, Muslims engaged Jesuit Chinese writings—they read Jesuit literature and sometimes used it for their own purposes. Thus, the question of the Jesuit-Islamic encounter in China has two related sides. One involves the way in which Jesuits reacted to the presence of Muslims in China. This side of the story, as one can sense from the use of European terms for Islam and Muslims—“Saracens” and “Moors”—belongs not only in the history of the Jesuit mission in China, but also, and perhaps even more, to the history of European and Islamic interaction and contention on the other side of world—in the Euro-Mediterranean world. The ways in which Jesuits represented Muslims to European readership is an impor-tant topic, which has much to teach us much about certain aspects of Renaissance culture. This essay, however, focuses on Muslim-Jesuit interac-tions in China itself. Since Chinese Islam is still little known, its main relevant aspects need to be introduced here.

II. The Special Relationship between Chinese Muslims and Jesuits

As we have seen, Ricci asserted that the main issue for the Muslims who were reading his book with such interest was theology—“doctrine,” to use his word. Ricci observed—or had, in fact, been told—that the Muslims were situated somehow between the Jesuit position and that of the Chi-nese, concerning the critical issue of divinity. On the one hand, Ricci says that the Muslims were “familiar” with Chinese classics because “they live in this country.” But, at the same time, they seemed—to Ricci, at least—to find Jesuit material (specifically, Ricci’s work on the Lord of Heaven), more consistent with their own doctrines. So the dual dimension of the Muslim position (both Islamic and Confucian) is represented elegantly in Ricci’s statement. It is tempting to characterize this position as an intermediate one—with the Muslims lying somehow between Chinese and Jesuits, but it would be wrong to approach the question in this way. As much as inter-mediate situations are celebrated by some scholars today—note the fasci-nation in recent years with “hybridity”—it is meaningless to posit that there was a gap between Chinese and Jesuit ideas about divinity—say, between Heaven and God—and that Muslims were positioned somewhere between the two. To do so is to reduce Chinese-Islamic thought about divinity to a passive compromise between Chinese and Jesuit ideas, pre-venting us from seeing Muslims thinkers as autonomous. An approach that uses the Jesuits as a way to evaluate Chinese Islam obscures the fact that the Muslims in China had long had their own ideas about divinity.


At some point in the late sixteenth century, Chinese Muslim scholars began to produce Islamic texts in Chinese. Indeed, the ensuing century and a half was marked by the creation of what might be termed the first indigenous Chinese Muslim scholarly tradition, as Chinese Muslims began to transition away from Arabic and Persian texts and toward Chinese trans-lations; later they would produce their own, wholly new, Islamic literature, entirely in Chinese. In the course of this work of translation and textual production, Chinese Muslim scholars would become fascinated by some of the same questions with which Ricci struggled: how to render concepts born in the West into Chinese linguistic and cultural idioms.

Ricci’s book was thus published in a context already marked by the interest of Chinese Muslims in some of the questions it addressed. This must have contributed to the Chinese-Muslim perception of shared ground and affinities between Muslim and Jesuit projects in China. Representa-tives of the two were watching one another. Ricci, for example, commented with surprise on the fact that the Muslims of China “do not disseminate [their faith], nor do they try to acquire [converts] or to publicize their faith.”8 Evidently, on some level Ricci seems to have expected the Muslims to be doing something like what the Jesuits had come to do in China; at the very least, he judged them according to what he himself was doing in China.

This attitude would persist for centuries. Peter Ivanovich Kafarov, known as the Archimandrite Palladii (d. 1879), head of the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing and a talented scholar of Chinese literature and culture, blatantly aligned the Jesuit and Muslim trajectories in China. Hostile to both Muslims and Jesuits, Palladii noted that the earliest Chinese Muslim literature had appeared just after the arrival of the Jesuits and claimed that China Islamic writing had begun primarily in response to the recent mis-sionary activities of the Jesuits:

It is remarkable that the appearance of these works in the Middle Kingdom coincided with the first written essays in the Chinese language by Catholic missionaries. The one and the other, and for the same reasons, exploited Confucianism, the dominant school in the country. . . . [The Chinese Muslims] also accepted that the best propaganda in a country like China would be means of the written word, and by accommodating their own ideas with the generally accepted ethical laws of the educated Chinese. The same point of view was also adopted by the Jesuits.9

8) D’Elie, Fonti Ricciane: 1:110-1.9) L. Panskaya, Introduction to Palladii’s Chinese Literature of Muslims (Canberra: Australian National University, 1977): 67-8.


In other words, in this view, the Muslims and Jesuits were the same: agents of deception who took advantage of Confucianism for converting the Chi-nese to Islam or Catholicism.

Other scholars have identified other affinities. In 1925, Japanese his-torian Kuwata Rokurō (d. 1987) suggested that Jesuit activity in China had triggered a Muslim written response and had, in effect, prompted the growth of a Chinese Muslim literary tradition. Clearly working in a para-digm that considered the Muslims essentially “other” than the Chinese non-Muslim majority, Kuwata speculated that Chinese Muslims began writing about Islam because they feared that Chinese criticism of the Jesuits would make them, too, vulnerable to criticism. He opined, therefore, that Mus-lims had felt a need to explain and justify Islam to the Chinese.10 Later on, modern Chinese Muslim intellectuals speculated that the reason Islam sur-vived in China was precisely because Muslims, unlike the Jesuits, did not proselytize. They specifically invoked the 1723-4 Yongzheng edict against the Jesuits and their proselytizing as proof of their own innocence.11

Some contemporary scholarship, too, seeks affinities and draws com-parisons between Chinese Muslims and Jesuits. In 2000, in a foreword written for a first-of-its-kind translation of a Chinese Muslim work into English, Confucian scholar Tu Weiming stated:

In choosing to express themselves in classical Chinese, the Chinese ulama were com-pelled to use a non-Islamic idiom as a medium of communication. This obliged them to respond to the Confucian intellectual world. The case of Matteo Ricci and his Jesuit colleagues readily comes to mind for comparison.12

Specifically, Tu compares Ricci’s project to that of the great early-eighteenth-century Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi, author of numerous books on Chinese Islam. He concludes that, unlike Ricci, who was, in his view, “not accommodating but hegemonic,” Liu “was neither accommodating nor subverting” of Confucian thought. Tu also declares that, in light of Liu Zhi’s achievements in writing on Islam in classical Chinese, “what Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuits accomplished was not exceptional.” Finally, he claims that Liu Zhi’s work “has enriched and enlarged the Confucian

10) R. Kuwata, “Minmatsu shinsho no kaiju,” in Tōyōshi ronsō: Shiratori hakushi kanreki kinen, ed. H. Ikeuchi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1925): 377-86.11) M. Makīn (Ma Jian), Nazra jāmiʿa ilā taʾrīkh al-Islām fī l-Sīn wa-ahwāl al-Muslimīn fīhā: Zhungguo Huijiao gaiguan (Cairo: al-Matbaʿa al-Salafiyya, 1934).12) T. Weiming, “Foreword,” in S. Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000): ix.


discourse comparable to and in several areas more significantly than the great work of the Jesuits, notably the endeavor of Matteo Ricci.”13

In short, observers and scholars of comparative religion in the Chinese context have turned to Islamic and Jesuit history in the country as analogs, each designed to help us better understand the other. As this short over-view suggests, the histories of the Jesuit and Chinese Muslim projects sometimes become entangled in ways that are unhelpful and historically inaccurate. Such entanglements have in common the assumption that, as fellow monotheists in China, Jesuits and Muslims have had, or should have had, a special relationship, either positive or negative. This was indeed the case—China was not an arena in which Muslims and Jesuits were in direct competition or contention.

The changing images of the Muslims—first, ape-like mimics of Jesuits; later, equally evil; then vulnerable potential victims of their project; and, finally, greater, better, and nobler scholars than Ricci and his friends—seem to reflect changes in our own perceptions of the Jesuit project, of China, and of Islam, more than of any verifiable historical reality. It is thus important to keep in mind the histories of this imagined special relation-ship, so that we can judge the affinities between Jesuits and Muslims in China with an eye instead on the early modern Chinese context.

III. Defining Chinese Muslims and Chinese Islam vis-à-vis the Jesuits

As Palladii observes above, the historical coincidence between the presence of Jesuit materials in China on one hand and the rise of Chinese Islamic literature on the other is crucial, but extensive study of the history of Chi-nese-Islamic scholarship yields no suggestion that Palladii is correct. The mere rise of Chinese-Islamic literature had nothing to do with the arrival of the Jesuits in China. Its growth had instead to do with numerous proc-esses, most of them closely related to transformations within Chinese soci-ety at large or within Chinese Islam itself. The expansion of Islamic educational networks from the northwest to the rich and assimilated regions of eastern China, where the overwhelming majority of Chinese Islamic books were produced and where most of the scholars lived, corre-sponds with the unprecedented rise of prosperity and literacy in the these

13) T. Weiming, “Epilogue,” in S. Murata, W.C. Chittick, and Tu Weiming, The Sage Learn-ing of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center 2009): 581-617.


regions, most notably the Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan). Similarly, the rise of the Chinese Islamic education system correlates with the general expan-sion in education in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-ries. Given the scale involved, it is far more plausible that these factors—which pervaded the region in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims lived—shaped their literary activities than that the few Jesuit missionaries operating there at the time were so influential as to have prompted the changes in literary culture.

Furthermore, the Ming-Qing dynastic transition and the rise of the Manchu dynasty, which aggressively promoted a vision of a multi-ethnic empire, were also decisive in the appearance of an identitarian impulse in the writings of Chinese Muslim scholars and in the rise of an early attempt to articulate an identity that was simultaneously Chinese and Muslim.14 From a scholarly point of view, we see that Chinese Islamic scholarship began with translations of Arabic and Persian texts, mostly of in the Sufi mystical tradition, which was studied in Muslim schools in Chinese. Orig-inal Chinese Islamic texts were first produced much later, well into the seventeenth century.

Sufi thought—mostly derivative of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240)—was the main foundation of Chinese Islamic original thought, that is, of works that were not simply translations or annotations of pre-existing Islamic texts but that marked new creations, in Chinese, about Islam. Sufism enabled Chinese Islamic thinkers to engage other forms of knowledge—Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and even Christianity—with Sufi principles provid-ing a framework for creative and imaginative thought. Sufi thought also provided ways to think and write about Islam esoterically, in ways that could be understood differently by different readers; this gave its authors even greater freedom of expression. Above all, with their new Chinese-language creations, Chinese Muslim authors were catering to the needs of their own community and their own educational system, which was pro-ducing a growing body of educated, Chinese-speaking Muslims who, true to their Confucian context, prized learning above all else.15

Such were the internal trajectories in Chinese and, specifically, Chinese Islamic history that shaped the rise of Chinese Muslim literature. Jesuits in

14) Z. Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Impe-rial China (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005).15) Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad. On Chinese Islam and Sufi thought, see Murata et al., The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi.


particular, and Christianity as a whole in China, at least during the early stages, did not contribute to or take part in any of these processes and transformations. Finally, the fact that the Chinese Muslims authors were writing in order to address the needs—educational, spiritual, identitarian—of their own community, should decisively remove any notion of a compe-tition between them and the Jesuits in China. The two simply had very different projects to carry out, on very different scales. It seems evident from the many threads of historical evidence that Jesuits did not trigger the rise of Chinese Islamic thought.

So the scholarly discussion about Jesuits and Muslims in China has been miscast. This does not, however, mean that we should not think about Jesuits and Muslims in China in any shared context. We should start think-ing about how to approach the subject without doing injustice to Jesuit history or to the Muslim history of the period. Instead of pondering whether Jesuits and Muslims in China were the “same” or “different,” or whether they were in competition or in alliance, “good” or “bad,” we can more fruitfully discuss several key areas in which we can see how Muslims engaged, and sometimes used, Jesuit knowledge. Some introduction to the Muslims of China will also be necessary.

Despite Ricci’s repeated insistence that Islam was a foreign religion in China, the Muslims of China were Chinese (I am referring here, again, only to Muslims from China proper). Their literate elite spoke and wrote Chinese, and they had for centuries been integrated into all Chinese eco-nomic, social, legal, and cultural systems and institutions. Above all, even though they always recognized, and grappled with, the foreign origins of their faith, Muslims considered themselves an integral part of China’s human landscape, though not everyone in China agreed. Observers of the period were struck by this. Father Alvaro Semedo (d. 1658-9), for instance, describes them as follows:

There are moreover in China, Moors in great abundance, not in all the Provinces, nor in every City, but yet in the more principall. They speak the language of the Countrie, and know nothing of their own tongue, a few words only excepted . . . In their Physi-ognomie, nose, eyes, beard and face, they are altogether like the Chinesses. They are Merchants, Physicians &c. They have Offices in the Tribunals: they study and are admitted to the examinations, and come many times to be Mandarines, but not of the great ones: for the most part they stop at the degree of Licentiate.16

16) A. Semedo, The History of That Great Renowned Monarchy of China: Wherein All the Particular Provinces Are Accurately Described (London: E. Tyler for Iohn Crook, 1655): 152.


Muslims participated in the Confucian examination system and seemed, in all respects, to be Chinese. And to be Muslim was perhaps more a mat-ter of genealogy than of “confession” or “belief ” (it is difficult to find terms that avoid anachronism and that do not apply our own notions of religion to other contexts). That is to say, in many cases, people identified them-selves as Muslims simply because their ancestors were Muslims. In other cases, Muslims were people who followed Islamic liturgy and law to vary-ing degrees. So, from the outset, any analytic framework that posits Chi-nese versus Muslims is an artificial one, designed only to facilitate discussion.17 The overlap between these two categories was significant, and was indeed, for many Chinese Muslims, complete.

Taking into account the more complicated trajectory along which Chi-nese Islamic thought developed—a trajectory far closer to Chinese culture and thought than Ricci would imagine—we must ask ourselves whether there was might have been more to the interest of “many Saracens, follow-ers of the Moorish faith” in Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi.

Ricci did not know for certain why the Muslims were buying his book. Usually a careful writer, Ricci is cautious in the wording of his report. In his first statement, he says that “it seems” that there are such similarities. He later repeats the notion, suggesting that the ideas expressed in the Tianzhu shiyi “seem to the Muslims” as similar. Moreover, the message in this statement does not correspond with what Ricci says elsewhere about the Chinese Muslims. In the most detailed report on them in his writings, he specifically says that the Muslims “do not proselytize and do not publi-cize their faith” and, moreover, that the Chinese Muslims live “in great ignorance” of their faith (in grande ignorantia della loro setta). This does not correspond exactly with the idea that his book was of interest to Muslims because of its subtle presentation of the deity. Ricci describes the Muslims as people who keep largely to themselves and focus only on practices: prayer, circumcision, and dietary laws. The Muslim educated elite, he asserts, is profoundly assimilated: “Many of them, having received official rank, abandon their old beliefs, retaining only their prohibitions against eating pork, to which they have never become accustomed.”18

We thus have two conflicting images of Muslims that are difficult to reconcile. In one, apparently erudite and knowledge-hungry Muslims buy books en masse and read them so they can make comparisons between

17) Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad.18) D’Elie, Fonti Ricciane: 1:110-1.


what they find in them and what they read in Chinese books. These Mus-lims are also able to pass the subtle judgment that what they find in the Jesuit materials is closer to their own doctrines than are Chinese ideas about the divine (recall Ricci’s words, “better than the books of China”). In the other image are those who are Muslims in liturgy only and who live in great ignorance of their own “sect”; note that there is no mention of “doc-trines” that the Muslims might have upheld or had. These Muslims do not debate religious, theological, or intellectual questions with the Chinese. One might expect the Muslim educated elite to be best equipped and ready to engage in the exercise in comparative religion that Ricci implies, but they seem to be more interested in hiding their Muslim identity than in discussing it. These closeted Muslim officials are, according to Ricci, the farthest from their faith (except for abstaining from pork): they have aban-doned it almost completely. The Muslims intellectually and socially best equipped to engage Ricci’s work were also the least likely to want to do so.

Ricci is correct to invoke “doctrinal similarities” as the reason that Mus-lims buy and read his book. The Christian divinity was closer to the Mus-lim divinity—it was, after all, the same God of Abraham. But, in light of the rest of evidence presented here, we must not be satisfied with this as the only explanation. We must ask ourselves whether the Muslims who bought his books did so also for other reasons. What was specifically Chinese in Chinese Islam, and what was its common ground with Christianity in a Chinese setting?

IV. The Idea of the West in China

In his writings, Ricci notes a clear (to him) common ground between Christianity and Islam (and Judaism) in China. Bolstering this view was his awareness that China’s non-Muslim population tended to view the three faiths as very similar or nearly identical. Ricci notes in his writings that the term Huihui, the common name in Chinese for Muslims, was also used to refer to Nestorian Christians and to Jews who had lived there for centuries. The former were called “Huihui of the Cross” and the latter “Huihui who reject the sinew.”19 But, while he knew that non-Muslim Chinese regarded the three religions this way, grouping them together as

19) For a discussion of Huihui see M. Ricci (Li Madou), “Xiguo jifa”: 141-68 (quotation on p. 146); see also Spence, Memory Palace: 93-4.


having originated in the same world, Ricci was less interested in their com-monalities than in their differences and, of course, in the primacy of Chris-tianity. In his famous Mappamundi, Ricci was detailed and meticulous concerning relevant European locations and the Holy Land, which he called Judea (Ru de ya). But he remained silent as to locations such as Mecca, Medina, and Istanbul, all of which were very important in Islam. In fact, the Arabian Peninsula scarcely appears on the map, where it is depicted as a mere appendage, smaller than Rudeya. And while he writes that the “Lord of Heaven was born” in the Holy Land, he does not men-tion that Muhammad was born in Mecca. This is not to say that the map was not detailed enough in that part of the world to include such features. On the contrary, Ricci takes care to place Armenia (Ya er mo ni ya) north of the area representing the Arabian Peninsula.20

Ricci’s map is a fine example of the Jesuit missionaries’ tendency to report on China “through Christian lenses.”21 Ricci’s West was a decidedly Christian West, devoid of Muslims, even in quintessentially Islamic lands. The Westerness of Christianity—or rather, Christianity’s status as sole Western religion—was clearly a fraught issue for Ricci, but it was probably the leading reason that his books aroused the curiosity of his Muslim read-ers, who were also preoccupied with their own status as of Western origin and with the question of what that meant in the Chinese context. The West in this context does not of course denote the West in its contempo-rary Euro-American sense. It is difficult for the modern reader to imagine a West other than the hegemonic world conqueror we see today. For Ricci’s Chinese Muslim readers, the West was a West as seen from the East, from China, in whose history and imagination there had always been more than one West. A consciousness of the West had existed in China for millennia. A legend concerning the circumstances of the composition of the Dao de jing, for instance, recounts that Lao Zi wrote the book before departing for the West. More concretely, a territory named xiyu (western regions) had existed in Chinese geographical knowledge from early times, and official histories beginning with the Han dynasty all included a section, under that

20) I am consulting here an excellent Japanese reproduction, M. Ricci, Ri Matō Kon’yo bankoku zenzu (Kyoto: Rinsen Shoten, 1996); see also the map and Ricci’s attached text in Ricci (Li Madou), “Kunyu Wanguo Quantu,” in M. Ricci, Li Madou Zhongwen zhuyi ji (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2001): 171-215.21) Timothy Brook, “Europaelogy: on the Difficulty of Assembling a Knowledge of Europe in China,” in M. Üçerler, J. Antoni eds., Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China in Com-parison, 1543-1644, (Roma: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009): 270.


heading, that described those territories. Originally, xiyu meant more or less the territories on China’s northwestern borders, but as Chinese geo-graphical knowledge reached farther west, more territories were included under the rubric of xiyu.22

The Chinese West came also to be associated with Buddhism, which came from India. India and Buddhism stood, at least from the fourth and fifth centuries, for the West in Chinese imagination. For instance, the mythical pilgrimage of the famous seventh-century monk Xuanzang to India was reproduced in Wu Cheng’en’s famous Journey to the West in the 1590s.23 The “West” in the title of the novel is India, a place that, for well over a millennium, was an important source of religious and scientific knowledge for China. Indeed, the Westerness of Buddhism and the West-erness of the Jesuits were features of the Buddhist-Jesuit encounter in China. The earliest recorded response to Ricci’s teachings involving Bud-dhist argumentation specifically maintained, before moving on to level criticisms and accusations, that the Jesuits had “introduced a divinity from the West.”24 Clearly, it was not only Ricci’s hostility to Buddhism that ignited his critics’ interest in his writings but also the “common”—that is, “Western” in this context—origins of the divinity he represented.25

When the great Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi discovered a long lost biography of the prophet Muhammad, he exclaimed “I have come across a Western classic!”26 Alongside India, the world of Islam was regarded as China’s other West from at least the early Ming period. While its religious impact on China was limited and cannot in any way be compared with Buddhism, Islam’s scientific impact on China was significant. China and the Islamic world exchanged scientific and technological knowledge from as early as the ninth century, and we have evidence of Muslims coming to serve as astronomers at the court from the Song period on. During the

22) Xiyu became also a recognized category of knowledge in late Imperial China; see X. Song, Xiyu shui dao ji: Wai er zhong (Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju, 2005).23) W. Cheng’en, The Journey to the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).24) D. Lancashire, “Buddhist Reaction to Christianity in Late Ming China,” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 6/1-2 (1968-9): 82-102.25) R. Po-chia Hsia recently presented a nuanced documentation of the Jesuit encounter with Buddhism during the Ming, highlighting Michele Ruggieri’s unique position in this episode. R. Hsia, “The Jesuit encounter with Buddhism in Ming China,” in Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China in Comparison, 1543-1644, ed. M.A.J. Üçerler (Rome: Insti-tutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009): 19-43.26) Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: 152.


Mongol period, Islamic science and technology arrived, and many Muslim technicians and administrators settled in China. After the founding of the Ming dynasty, in 1368, the court ordered the translation of many of the Muslims’ books into Chinese. An official Muslim bureau of Astronomy was created as a branch of the imperial bureau of astronomy.27 Muslim astronomers served there for centuries, a matter of great pride to the Chi-nese Muslim elite.28 (It is perhaps no coincidence that a Muslim astrono-mer, Wu Mingxuan, was intensely involved, alongside Yang Guangxian [d. 1669], in the famous scientific confrontation with the Jesuit astrono-mers at the Qing court, in 1657.29 Unlike the case of Yang Guangxian, we know little of Wu’s motivations, but we can assume that the man—who found himself flogged during the confrontation—rather than being hostile to Christians, probably resented being replaced, as it were, by new Westerners. But that episode came much after Ricci’s time.)30

In any case, regardless of Ricci’s silences about world geography, it was clear that, during the Ming dynasty, the West was Muslim. Ming geo-graphical knowledge included much detail about the regions beyond its northwestern borders, the xiyu, which had, by now, come be to be identi-fied almost exclusively with Islam. The Xiyu zhuan (record of the Western regions) in the Ming official history is filled with references to locations that are known as the Huihui zuguo (ancestral lands of the Muslims). By that time, these regions stretched all the way to Middle East. The Huihui

27) See, for instance, K. Yabuuti, “Islamic Astronomy in China during the Yuan and Ming Dynasties,” Historia Scientiarium 7 (1997): 11-43; B. Van Dalen, “Islamic and Chinese Astronomy under the Mongols: A Little-Known Case of Transmission,” in From China to Paris: 2000 Years Transmission of Mathematical Ideas, ed. Y. Dold-Samplonius et al. (Stutt-gart: Steiner, 2002): 327-56.28) W. Feng, Zhongguo Huizu kexue jishu shi (Yinching: Ningxia Renmin Chubanshe, 2008): 24-114. On Muslim pride about Islamic science, see Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, “The Marrano Emperor: The Mysterious Bond between Zhu Yuanzhang and the Chinese Mus-lims,” in Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder Across Six Centuries of East Asian History, ed. S. Schneewind (Minneapolis: Society for Ming Studies, 2008): 275-308.29) On that episode and Wu Mingxuan, see B. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005): 134-48.30) For a full account of the episode that does justice to the history of Islamic astronomy at the court and to Wu’ role in the quarrel, see H.T. Zurndorfer “One Adam Having Driven Us Out of Paradise, Another Has Driven Us Out of China”: Yang Kuang-hsien’s Challenge of Adam Schall von Bell,” in L. Blussé and H.T. Zurndorfer, eds., Conflict and Accommoda-tion in Early Modern East Asia: Essays in Honour of Erik Zürcher (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993): pp. 141-168.


li (Islamic calendar) section of the official Ming history also states several times that Islamic astronomy had been brought by people from the West (xiyu, or xiyang).31 More importantly, the great Ming geographic encyclo-pedia, the Da Ming yitong zhi (The Unification Gazetteer of the Great Ming, 1461) refers specifically to Mecca (Tianfangguo, or Moke) as the “place of the heavenly temple, also called the western regions (xiyu).” The book refers to Medina as “the ancestral home of the Huihui [and] origi-nally the place where the king Muhammad was born with divine qualities.”32 Other Ming sources, such as the Qixiu leigao (Draft Arranged in Seven Categories), a collection of notes on political and historical issues com-piled during the 1460s, took this information further, clearly linking it to the “Huihui teaching” (Huihui jiao).33 Thus, in the fifteenth century, over a century before the arrival of Ricci, official Chinese knowledge had come to consider the holy places of Islam as part of its West. It also clearly recog-nized the divine qualities of the prophet Muhammad, who had been born in those western regions. At the very least, Ming sources acknowledged that this was what the Muslims in China had always recounted.

Consciousness of being “from the West” was acute among Muslim elites, and the association between the two was strong: the term xiyu often denoted “Islam” or “Mecca” in Chinese Islamic writings.34 The prophet Muhammad was known, particularly in Islamic writings from the Ming and early Qing periods, as the Great Western Sage (xifang da shengren).35 When Ma Zhu (d. after 1685), a Chinese Muslim author who was par-ticularly proud of his direct genealogical link to Muhammad, wanted to introduce himself to the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722), he wrote that the prophet of Islam was “Muhammad, most sagely of the Western regions” (xiyu zhisheng muhanmode).36

It is therefore important to keep in mind that when Europe was intro-duced in China as the “West” there were already two other “wests” in Chinese imagination.37 The best illustration for this point is the more elab-

31) Yabuuti, “Islamic Astronomy.”32) X. Li, Da Ming yitong zhi (paginated facsimile) (Taipei: Tongyi chuban, 1965): 10:5556-7.33) Y. Lang, Qi xiu leigao (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2001): 181-2.34) Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad, 18-9.35) W. Daiyu, Zheng jiao zhen quan; Qing zhen da xue; Xi zhen zheng da (Yinchuan: Ningxia renmin chubanshe, 1999): 32.36) Zh. Ma, “Qing Biao Bao,” in Qingzhen zhinan (Xining: Qinghai, 1990): 26.37) On the introduction of Europe as the “West” see Brook, “Europaelogy: 270-275. Brook comments that the “core of Western Learning [in China] was Christina dogma, yet the


orate title that knowledge carried in China: not just Learning of the West, but Taixi xue (Learning of the Far West).38 Jesuits and their God were like-wise known in China as “Westerners.” Giulio Aleni (d. 1649) made a name for himself as the “Confucius from the West” (xilai Kungzi).39 Moreover, in keeping with the (non-Muslim) Chinese tendency to lump together the Huihui faiths, the Jesuits were often compared to other Westerners qua Westerners. The literatus and publisher, Zhang Chao (d. c. 1707), in his Essential Ideas about the Countries of the West (1669), gave a favorable description of Christianity, specifically comparing it to Buddhism, a reli-gion that came to China from India, which “is also called Western Lands.” Having compared Buddhist and Christian attitudes towards everyday life—including sex and food—and to hierarchies of power and honor, Zhang exclaimed, “how could one hesitate, faced with a choice between these two Western regions? Thus, the ideas of the distant West [Christian-ity] win out over those of other doctrines.” Tellingly, Zhang added, “the only trouble is that is it is a pity that they speak of a master of heaven (Tianzhu shiyi), an incorrect and distasteful term.”40 Zhang, in short, was interested primarily in Jesuits and Christianity as first and foremost West-ern phenomena; only after dwelling on their Westerness did he turn his attention to that pitiful business of God.

Fans and detractors alike stressed the Westerness of Christianity. Yang Guangxian, archenemy of the Jesuits, complained that, unlike Mongols and other foreigners, “these Westerners come and go quite unimpeded and no questions asked.” Shen Que (d. 1627), vice-minister of the Nanjing Board of Rites, complained in 1616 that the missionaries arrogantly used the term “great West,” when only the Ming was truly great.41 Most tell-ingly, during the seventeenth-century study of Christian doctrine, tianxue (heavenly studies) became synonymous with xixue (Western studies).42 In

content of xixue [Western Learning] was not exclusively religious matters (pp. 270-271). The Chinese Islamic version of xixue is strikingly similar: Islamic Teachings mixed with geography and science of the Islamic world. This raises the possibility that also in the case of the production of their respective versions of Western Learning Jesuits and Muslims were watching each other, but it still requires further research. 38) Mentioned in Brook, “Europaelogy: 270.39) R. Malek and T. Lippiello, Scholar from the West: Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582-1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China (Brescia: Fondazione civiltà bresciana, 1997).40) Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: 39-40.41) Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: 135.42) Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: 36, 58, 65.


short, the Christian god was, therefore, primarily a Western god. The way in which he mattered to his human devotees—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—mattered much less.

The understanding that the Christian god was a Western god is critical. It meant that, for Chinese Muslims, the question of Christian divinity was a question primarily of geography, not of theology. Indeed, Muslims per-ceived Jesuit literature primarily as Western literature and engaged it as such. This was probably the main reason they found it so interesting and appealing to begin with. It was not, as Ricci assumed, doctrinal similarities that drew Chinese Muslims to Christian literature, but the fact that it was considered Western literature. This is what gave it great meaning to Mus-lims—a people whose own classics and knowledge had originated in the West. In his autobiography, the Chinese Muslim scholar Liu Zhi, born around 1660, said that he had read, during the course of his studies, “137 Western books” (xiyang shu yibai sanshi qi zhong). As I have shown else-where, these “Western books” could only have been Jesuit materials, because Liu had listed all other categories of books separately: Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, and Islamic. Moreover, one of his disciples later identi-fied these books specifically as “European” (Oulouba zhi wen). The place of the Jesuits’ books in Liu’s scholarly world is more clearly revealed in the entire passage:

I was fifteen when I began studying. For eight years, I read with robust diligence the Confucian classics, the histories, philosophies, belles lettres, and the books of various schools. For six additional years, I read the Tianfang [Islamic] classics. For three more years I read the Buddhist canon, for one more year I read the Daoist canon. I then proceeded with reading Western books, [a total of ] 137 copies. [So I] achieved mas-tery through comprehensive study of the doctrines of the various schools. However, I was filled with admiration for Islamic doctrines.43

Perhaps Liu exaggerated the number slightly, but it is clear that Jesuit books were, for him, representative of just another of the “various schools” to be found in China, and not a special one. The Jesuits possessed knowl-edge that he considered worthy of study, and he studied their texts just as he studied Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian texts. Liu’s language changes somewhat when he mentions the Jesuits: only in this case does he provide the exact number of books that he had read. This sets the Jesuit material apart from that of the other bodies of knowledge he mentions—Confu-

43) Ben-Dor Benite, Dao of Muhammad: 146.


cian, Buddhist, and Daoist—although this might simply reflect the fact that the Jesuits were not really an established school of scholarship in China, and the volume of their work was relatively small. It is probable that, because Jesuit/Christian knowledge was canonized or at least assem-bled as a recognized corpus (zang), Liu felt he needed to provide a specific number.

More important is the fact that Liu concludes by defining all of the categories of material, including Islam and the Western books, as the “var-ious schools.” Furthermore, his presentation of things in a matter-of-fact tone suggests that Jesuit material was just like any other source of knowl-edge for Liu, nothing more and nothing less.

Liu’s non-Muslim readers certainly understood his work in the context of the Westernness sketched above. Xu Zhuo, an official from Zhejiang, praised Liu Zhi’s work for his use of the “language of the Ru (Confucian scholars) [in order to transmit the] knowledge of the West” (yong Ru wen chuan xixue).44 Xu uses the term xixue, which was usually reserved for the study of Jesuit literature. In other words, Chinese Islamic literature was considered by non-Muslim Chinese as part of the knowledge that came from the West through the Jesuits.

V. Muslim Uses of Jesuit Knowledge: Dialogue with Whom and about What?

The image of a Confucian scholar commenting on the work of a Muslim scholar and linking it to Christian works exclusively through geography probably best illustrates the way in which such dialogues and exchanges occurred: Jesuit, Muslim, and Confucian ideas circulated in many direc-tions, and Muslims, at least, considered themselves participants in a mul-tilateral, not a bilateral, dialogue. They dialogued with Confucians and Jesuits at the same time, and their arguments drew on all sources to which they had access: Islamic, classical Chinese, and Jesuit. In this regard, the Muslim reaction to Jesuit ideas should be placed on what Erik Zürcher calls “the scala [range] of Chinese reactions” to knowledge and informa-tion they disseminated in China.45

44) Ben-Dor Benite, Dao of Muhammad: 150.45) Zürcher, “In the Beginning”: 133.


There is no doubt that Chinese Muslim authors used Jesuit works and knew them well. On the most superficial level, they simply copied or “bor-rowed” from them information that they needed. Liu Zhi, for instance, cited Aleni’s concise geography of the world, the Zhifang Waiji, in a vol-ume of sources on the geography of the Islamic world, borrowing from Aleni the section on Asia Minor.46 The reason for this is simple: all the other sources Liu had used were from known Chinese geographical works. These sources had been compiled too early to include the Ottoman Empire. Even the ones compiled during the fifteenth century probably relied on much earlier sources and thus could not include recently acquired Islamic territories such as Istanbul, so Liu took this information from Aleni. Liu Zhi also copied information from Ricci in his opus Tianfang Xingli (Nature and Principle of Islam), the largest and most learned Chinese Islamic trea-tise on cosmology and nature. Even though all knowledge in the book was presented as Islamic knowledge, Liu Zhi did not hesitate to borrow heavily from Ricci’s Qiankun tiyi (Essential Explanation of Heaven and Earth) and from the Mappamundi. Liu used Ricci for his map of the “seven climes of Earth” and for a diagram depicting the nine heavens.47 Sun Ke’an, a con-temporary Chinese Muslim scholar from Hangzhou, also used Aleni for information on Central Asia in his Qingzhen jiaokao (Examination of Islam). (None of this borrowing was lost on the hostile Palladii, who, cen-turies later, was careful to point it out, perhaps in order to lend further support to his accusation that the Muslims were just like the Jesuits in their deceitful tactics.)48

The above are all instances of the scientific, geographical use of Jesuit knowledge. They do not represent or suggest any particular religious inter-est or affinity. In their use of Jesuit materials for scientific purposes, Chi-nese Muslims differed little from other Chinese scholars who engaged Jesuit—and other—knowledge for scientific purposes. Moreover, as the examples of Istanbul and America suggest, it is clear that Muslims used Jesuit knowledge judiciously and selectively and only to complement what they themselves already possessed. Chinese Muslims do not differ in this regard from the majority of Chinese scholars, who engaged Jesuit knowl-

46) Zh. Liu, Tianfang zhi sheng shilu (1704, fac. ed.), (Beijing: Zhongguo Yisilan jiao xie-hui, 1984): 19:37-8. For Aleni’s work, see G. Alenio, Zhifang waiji (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936).47) See S. Murata, The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms (Cam-bridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).48) Pansakya, Introduction to Palladii: 73.


edge from a practical standpoint. Like Zhang Chao, they were able to appreciate what was useful and deplore what was pitiful. So it remains to see how they used Jesuit ideas about God.

If Chinese Muslims approached Jesuit books simply as sources of Western knowledge, it suggests that the Lord of Heaven, as Ricci intro-duced him to China, was not necessarily a competitor with Allah, in the sense that this was simply a Christian interpretation of the same divinity. Christian-Islamic and Christian-Jewish polemics in the Middle East and Europe revolved for centuries around precisely this question: whose inter-pretation of the messages of the same divinity is the correct one? By defini-tion, because it is the same divinity, there can be only one correct interpretation of that divinity’s messages and meaning. Everything that derived from them, including science (which was not a separate category), was understood as proof of the correctness of each interpretation. The Jesuits in China hoped that the superiority of their science would serve as testimony to the superiority of their faith.

The Chinese disagreed. They were selective and utilitarian in what they adopted from the Jesuits and other traditions. The approach of Chinese Muslim thinkers was no different. Understanding Jesuit knowledge as Western created more space for engaging it for a variety of purposes, not simply or specifically in order to compete with it, refute it, or concur with its notions of divinity. We should recall here what Zhang Chao said, when comparing Buddhism and Christianity, that one could pick what was appealing in a given Western way of thinking and living and reject, dis-miss, or ignore what seemed pitiful. Chinese Muslims approached Jesuit knowledge in the same way: they identified what seemed useful and dis-missed what was not. In the case of Chinese Islam, this meant, in concrete terms, that the Jesuit material was primarily simply another toolkit, a repository of knowledge from which they could select what was useful for their own purposes or otherwise resonant; what was not could be rejected with little ado.

As to matters of “doctrine,” as Ricci would have worded it, one can identify two crucial domains in which Muslim authors made use of and reacted to Jesuit materials. In both, Jesuit ideas were invoked in the context of an ongoing multilateral debate, and Muslims used Jesuit ideas to advance their own positions in the discussion, not to refute or to agree with their fellow monotheists.

First was the crucial issue of whether or not the Chinese, as Matteo Ricci and later Jesuits maintained, had once known the true God, a knowledge


that had somehow been lost. (The claim that the Chinese originally knew God was part of the Jesuit case for the compatibility of Confucianism and Christianity. By this argument, Confucius’s original ideas had been cor-rupted by Song neo-Confucians and their Buddhist metaphysics.)49 For the Confucian-oriented Muslim scholars, nothing could be more impor-tant than such an argument.

The same Jesuit argument appears in the first major original (as opposed to translated) Chinese Islamic work, which laid the foundation for all that followed in Chinese Muslim scholarship. The Zheng jiao zhen quan (The Real Commentary on the Correct Teaching), by Wang Daiyu (d. 1657), addresses directly this issue of the Chinese knowledge of God.50 A native of Nanjing, Wang’s teacher was Ma Junshi, also of Nanjing, who had received a classical Chinese education and even obtained a low-ranking official degree.51 Ma Junshi fits Alvaro Semedo’s description of highly assimilated Chinese Muslims who passed through the examination system; he took the official exams but did not do well. There is a strong possibility that the two men even had a chance to observe each other personally, while Ricci was staying in Nanjing in 1595, but if they did, neither ever said so. In any event, we should assume that Wang Daiyu had access to Jesuit knowledge as a young man, through his teacher or directly. Wang is impor-tant, as he is the first Chinese Muslim author who engaged the question of God systematically and coined the terminology that later Chinese Muslim thinkers would use. For Wang, God was or Zhen yi, or Zhen zhu, the True Lord or the True One. Note here the absence of Tian, which never occurs in Wang’s whole discussion about God and his attributes. It is perhaps here that we find the first instance of indirect dialogue with Ricci, because Wang’s choice of terminology seems specifically to avoid the use of the term “Tian,” or Heaven, which had featured so prominently in Ricci’s title, but that would be to assume a special relationship. Indeed, as Sachiko Murata and William Chittick have shown, zhen (truth) as the main attribute for God in Chinese Islamic thought, came directly out of Sufi thought, in which Wang was steeped. It is a direct translation of God as the

49) L.M. Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2007): 106. On Ricci and Buddhism, see R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 135-6.50) Wang, Zheng jiao: 38-98.51) On Wang and the Nanjing milieu, see Ben-Dor Benite, The Dao of Muhammad: 55-9, 134-8.


Truth, al-Haqq, in Arabic.52 Wang does not use Tian or Shangdi in any way as names for God, but he does bring these terms up in relation to the divine in a discussion of the notion of “false truths” (Si zhen) in a later chapter, following his introduction of the divine.53

The second chapter of Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi, which is especially germane to this discussion, is “An Explanation of Mistaken Views Concerning The Lord of Heaven Current among Men.”54 We can identify a similar strategy in Wang’s “false truths,” in which he criticizes the Confucians for having once known God and then lost their knowledge of Him. Using the very existence of this word, Tian, in the Chinese language as proof for this claim, he asks rhetorically, “Where did Tian come from? Where did Shangdi come from”? He implies that these words could have come into existence only to describe the one true God. The similarity between the Jesuit and Islamic arguments is striking, as is the fact that they are raised even though Tian and Shangdi are rejected by Muslims as names of the divine or even as attributes of it. Wang also specifically declares that the chief culprits in the corruption and loss of the concept of the divinity are the Song-period Confucians (Song Ru).55 Wang does not give credit to the rightful owners of this idea—the Jesuits—but in any case he produces an Islamic replica of Jesuit claims about the history of Chinese religions. Evi-dently, this replica is used judiciously: not in the context of what or who is God, as Ricci does—for this purpose Wang has his own arsenal of ideas—but in order to advance the claim that there is a common ground between “original” Confucianism and Islam. In short, Wang uses it because this is the only thing he needs from Ricci, a strategy for facilitating the discussion of God in Chinese.

We must bear in mind that Wang was writing when the idea of the Lord of Heaven was still the central theme in Chinese Christianity. Thus, the tactic of the rejection of Tian as a key part of the concept of God resonates loudly, even if it remains implicit. The adoption of the Jesuit strategy of using the existence of “Tian” as proof of an ancient Chinese recognition of the divine, which requires the use of the term in a theological context, makes this rejection even more forceful. The fact that this argument is used in the context of the presentation and discussion of a different

52) Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light.53) Wang, Zheng jiao: 99-106.54) Ricci, Tianzhu shiyi: 99-131.55) Wang, Zheng jiao: 99-100.


Chinese-language concept for God allows us to see the Chinese Muslim position in its full autonomy. The position remains consistent with its Islamic (Sufi) terminology and makes careful use of it in transplanting it into the Chinese context. At the same time, it makes judicious use of Jesuit arguments that help to advance its position without crediting or openly engaging Jesuit theology.

We see a similar strategy in the Muslim approach to the second most important aspect of what might be called the “Lord-of-Heaven theology,” that is, creationism. Creationism was one of the major issues debated between Jesuits and their Chinese interlocutors. For Jesuits, it was a major issue because of the scriptural basis for Christian assertions about creation. As Erik Zürcher explains, “The story of the Creation . . . is also very charac-teristic of what the Jesuits and their followers regarded [as] one of the outstanding qualities of the doctrine: It is shih, ‘concrete,’ ‘solid,’ opposed to abstract [Chinese cosmological] notions such as the Great Ultimate or to the Emptiness and Non-Being of Buddhism and Taoism.”56 For their Chinese interlocutors nothing in creationism was so sound and so sure. Roughly, the basic arguments against creationism were that there was no one creator and that all things were self-generated. As for the process of self-generation, Chinese views held that being originates from (the Daoist concept of ) non-being (you sheng yü wu); as Lao Zi maintains in the Dao dejing, “The creatures and things of this world come from being. And being from non-being.” In this process of being arising out of non-being, which takes place “by chance,” the Chinese held that various powers—e.g., Qi (Ether), Taiji (Supreme Ultimate) and Wuji (non-Ultimate), and Yin and Yang—play different roles.57

The main argument that Ricci marshaled against this theory—that self-generation was a casual process, and that being was linked to non-being—was that it was meaningless and groundless without a Mover or cause. In short, creation and being meant nothing without God and a divine plan. Following Ricci, several Christian authors—Aleni, the famous Chinese Confucian Christian convert Yang Tingyun, and others—included refuta-tions of Chinese views of nature. These refutations of anti-creationist views presented the basic Chinese view and moved on to refute it. The method was to present each actor in Chinese cosmology and either question its

56) Zürcher, “In the Beginning”: 143.57) For a summary of these points, see Zürcher, “In the Beginning”: 143-4. The quotation from the Dao Dejing is in chap. 40.


conceptual integrity or argue that it can operate in the universe without a Mover behind it.

In the Tianzhu shiyi, for instance, Ricci attacks the concept of “non-being,” which he understood to imply that final reality was nothing and certainly not God: “The ‘nothing’ spoken of by Lao Tzu and the ‘voidness’ taught by the Buddha are totally at variance with the doctrine concerning the Lord of Heaven; and it is therefore abundantly clear that they do not merit esteem.”58 Chinese scholars responded angrily, correcting his “mistakes.”59 With regard to the concept of the Supreme Ultimate (Taiji) Ricci attacked it using a strategy similar to that used for Tian, but in reverse: “I have assiduously studied the ancient records of China and dis-covered that the superior men of ancient times worshipped and revered the Sovereign on High, [the Supreme Lord] of Heaven and earth, but I have never heard of them paying respect to the Supreme Ultimate. If the Supreme Ultimate is the Sovereign on High and ancestor of all things, why did the sages of ancient times not say so?”60 Some Chinese responses to this were harsh: “In his teaching on Heaven Ricci is a traitor and usurper and a rebel against Confucius. . . . By destroying the Supreme Ultimate the demon Ricci destroyed the Mean.”61 Zürcher summarizes this episode aptly as “yet another dialogue of misunderstandings, a clash of beliefs that never developed into a real exchange of views, mainly because the basic concepts and assumptions were so far apart that they did not belong to the same universe of discourse.”62

The purpose of this sketch is not to provide a quick, and confusing, course in Chinese cosmology, but to allow us see the contours of the debate and the ways in which Jesuits engaged Chinese cosmology and argued their position. It also helps us to appreciate the Chinese Muslim position on the matter of creationism, first articulated by Ma Zhu in the 1660s, well after the debate between the Jesuits and the Chinese had begun. Ma (b. c. 1620) was a Confucian degree holder from Yunnan who later travelled all over China. He served for a time as a low-ranking official in the southern Ming court that was established in Yunnan after the fall of the Ming in Beijing to the Manchu Qing. (Perhaps he was one of those low-ranking Muslim

58) Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi: 99.59) Lancashire, “Buddhist Reaction”: 96-7.60) Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi: 107.61) Cited in the introduction to Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi: 45.62) Zürcher, “In the Beginning”: 163.


scholars described above by Alvaro Semedo, who knew this court well.)63 In any case, in the southern Ming court he probably met Andreas Wolf-gang Koffler (d. 1651), another Jesuit missionary who had spent time there gaining many Chinese converts to Christianity.64

Ma addressed the question of creation in a chapter of his influential Compass to Islam (Qingzhen Zhinan). The chapter, entitled Zhenci (True Benevolent Love), dealt with the divine-human relationship:

God (zhenzhu) flows into His slaves’ hearts as formless and featureless bright light and manifests [Himself ] in the myriad forms and appearances of the mountains, rivers, and earth. . . . From this we may know that though the myriad things are produced by the earth, this is not [effected by] the water and earth’s own accord.65

Evidently and unsurprisingly, Ma’s position replicates the Jesuits’. Reading carefully, we can hear an echo of the Jesuit-Chinese dialogue when Ma insists empathetically that nothing is created “by its own accord.” This assertion must be read against the backdrop of several decades of debate between Jesuit and Chinese scholar over that issue. The rest of the passage clarifies things:

Although that is the fundamental nature of these four things, the source to endow [them] with cold and heat, hardness and softness, can lie only in God’s omnipotence. The various schools of [Chinese] thinkers have not understood the original Mover of creation. They say that the non-Ultimate gave birth to the Supreme Ultimate, which could not but transform and generate Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang could not but transform and give birth to the myriad things [nature]. Pushing back before the Beyond Ultimate [in their theory], there is no Master to rely on, and they take Heaven and Earth as in and of themselves.

Clearly there is a dialogic and polemical quality to the passage. Indeed, a careful comparison of this section of Ma’s text with that discussing creation in Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi shows a striking resemblance between the two. In Ricci’s text, the Chinese and Western voices are clearly and separately iden-tified. In Ma’s, both positions have been collapsed into one voice. But in both, the Chinese position is represented as suggesting that the production

63) Semedo was the vice-provincial of the mission in the south and dispatched missionaries to the court in Yunnan. 64) On Koffler, see L. Carrington Goodrich and Zh. Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368-1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976): 722-4.65) Ma, Qingzhen zhinan (Yinchuan: Ningxia shaoshu minzu guji zhengli, 1987): 53.


of nature, the formation of the myriad things, begins with the non-Ultimate, for no specific reason. Both Ricci and Ma assert the Chinese failure to understand that there is a Mover, a purpose, and a cause behind the process of creation. “If there were no first cause to serve as the source of phenomena . . .the Supreme Ultimate would not be able to fill this role,” insists Ricci. If “there is no Master to rely on,” says Ma, one ends up “tak-ing heaven and earth in and of themselves.”66

Having established the necessity of a Mover, Ma, departing from the Jesuit argument, proceeds to lay out the Chinese Islamic version of creation.

Thus we may know that the non-Ultimate is not God, but without it God’s initial com-mandment could not be manifest. The Supreme Ultimate is not God, but without it, God’s vast power could not be manifest. Yin and Yang are not God, but without them, God’s subtle workings could not be manifest. Nature is not God, but without it, God’s perfect achievement could not be manifest. Individual nature is not God, but without it, God’s perfect benevolence could not be manifest.67

Here we can see where Chinese Muslims and Jesuits parted ways. Ricci critiqued Chinese views about creation and nature in order to introduce his own theology of the Lord of Heaven. In contrast, Chinese Muslims wanted ultimately to incorporate Confucian views into their own Islamic views about creation. This sysncretistic approach accounts for the praise that Liu Zhi received from eighteenth-century Confucian scholars, who lauded him for successfully explaining “a strange culture coming from afar, using Chinese language and the Confucian canon.”68

Ma’s treatment of creationism shows him adopting Jesuit strategies but using them to argue his own ends. This is characteristic of the general Chinese Muslim response to Jesuits in China and their teachings. Rather than argue with them on theological or doctrinal grounds or engage them substantively as co-monotheists, Chinese Muslims instead turned to their writings as a source for possible methodologies and strategies for engag-ing with the dominant Chinese culture. He agreed with the basic Jesuit assertion that, absent a “master,” the Chinese cosmology was meaning-less, that it had nothing to rely on. But his core interest was not so much

66) Ricci, Tianzhu Shiyi: 121.67) Ma, Qingzhen: 54.68) Ben-Dor Benite, Dao of Muhammad: 150.


in agreeing with the Jesuits—or even in engaging with them—as it was in seeing how others approached the debate with the dominant Chinese ideational systems.

By Ma’s time, the cosmological debate between Confucians and Jesuits had been going on for decades. It interested him, as one concerned with presenting Islam to the Chinese culture around him. Ma, like Wang Daiyu before him, made use of specific elements of knowledge generated by the Jesuit-Confucian debate and used them for his own purposes. Wang had had to contend with the very question of the existence of God, and he used the Jesuit argument about Chinese knowledge of Tian and Shangdi to fur-ther his position. Ma, writing later, had to contend with the problem of creation by God, and he used the Jesuit critique concerning the absence of a mover to further his position. Neither directly debated, much less embraced, Jesuit doctrine per se. Instead, they both used Jesuit arguments about Chinese religion to make their own case for Islam, and even to make a case for Islam as a Chinese religion.

As such cases remind us, Chinese Muslims believed themselves to be in dialogue not with Christianity but with their Confucian counterparts. More importantly, they were in dialogue with other Muslims who were part of the Confucian elite and struggled philosophically to reconcile Islam with Confucianism.69 Unlike the Jesuits, whose goal was ultimately to gain converts to Christianity, Chinese Muslim thinkers sought primarily to rec-oncile the two systems of thought to which they already subscribed.70 Our own categories—such terms as “Religions of the Book,” “Western religious traditions,” and even “the West”—have obscured the core dynamic and central features of religious “dialogue” as it was enacted in early modern China.

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