chapter 7 From a Persian Barbarian to a Superior Sage to Chinese Sages: the Image of the Prophet in Ma Zhu’s Shengzan

Hyondo Park

The Prophet Muḥammad, says Anne-Marie Schimmel, “defines the borders of as a religion,”1, 2 as in the second part of the shahāda, “Muḥammad is the messenger of God.” By this, Islam distinguishes itself from other mono- theistic religious traditions like Judaism and Christianity. The significance of Muḥammad in Muslim religious life cannot be emphasized enough. Muslim adoration and reverence for Muḥammad was so phenomenal in the eyes of scholars like Gibb, that he titled his introductory book to Islam “Mohammedanism,”3 though this was often criticized as a misnomer. As Smith observed in twentieth-century India, “Muslims will allow attacks on Allah: there are atheists and atheistic publications, and rationalistic societies; but to disparage will provoke from even the most ‘liberal’ sections of the community a fanaticism of blazing vehemence.”4 As the highest human ideal by which to fashion Muslim lives and conduct, Muḥammad is internalized in the hearts of Muslims like a jewel.5 Indeed, he is “dead only in the least signifi- cant sense. For he is ideologically alive—and well.”6 Although living as a minority far from the central Islamic world, Muslims in are no exception to the phenomenon of adoring Muḥammad, for “the history of Muslims in China is not a history isolated from other Muslims.”7 They too inherited the tradition of venerating the Prophet and they too

1 This paper is based on my dissertation at the University of Tehran (Chinese Muslim Images, 2014). Although I wrote most of it under the supervision of Professor Little, unfortunately I could not complete it at McGill. Yet he continued to encourage me until I finally finished it. Were it not for him, I could not have pursued my scholarly career as an Islamicist. Thank you my shaykh! In memoriam aeternam. 2 Schimmel, And Muhammad 3. 3 Gibb, Mohammedanism. 4 Smith, Modern Islam 72. 5 Asani and Abdel-Malek describe Muḥammad as being internalized into every Muslim’s heart. See Asani and Abdel-Malek, Celebrating Muḥammad 22. 6 Akhtar, Be careful 28; quoted in Bennett, In search of Muhammad 1. 7 Fletcher, Studies 3.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004415294_009 From a Persian Barbarian 193 internalized their love for him. However, they externalized their pious feelings for their Prophet by using their own distinctive indigenous local elements, often unheard of and even alien to traditional Islamic thought in the realm of Islam (dār al-Islām). As in the Indo-Muslim tradition, Chinese Muslims expressed the same sen- sus religiosus for their adoration of the Prophet according to their own distinct local tradition, that is, . In scope and nature, however, Chinese Muslim works differ from Indo-Muslim literature, for Chinese Muslim intel- lectuals living in an entirely non-Islamic milieu faced a distinctive historical and cultural situation. Theirs is “the first instance in which Muslims wrote major treatises in the language of one of the great, pre-existing intellectual traditions.”8 The externalization of their religious feelings for the Prophet was conditioned by the Chinese language, which is imbued with the culture of the Middle Kingdom: there are indigenous elements that would “certainly appear strange,” and often incomprehensible without knowledge of religio- philosophical traditions of the land, “if they could be translated directly back into Persian or Arabic.”9 Here, I refer to Shengzan (In praise of the Sage), by Ma Zhu (1640–1711?); this is the earliest rhymed prose panegyric for Muḥammad in Chinese Muslim literature, often called the Han Kitāb. Written around 1690, the roughly 5,800-character text embellishes the virtues of the Prophet with miraculous elements, by quoting from the Chinese classics; it constitutes a part of the sev- enth book of his multi-volume work on Islam, Qingzhen zhinan (Compass of the pure and real). It is composed of fifty-eight main sections (eight hundred forty-five characters), fifty-four of which are immediately followed by Ma’s own roughly five-thousand-character explanatory commentary. The work epit- omizes the earliest attempt to introduce the Prophet to both Muslim and non- Muslim Chinese audiences by means of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the land they lived in. The work served to deepen the love of the Prophet in the hearts of Ma’s fellow Chinese Muslims who could not read or write tradi- tional Muslim languages like Arabic or Persian. At the same time, the Chinese texts introduced the Islamic Prophet to non-Muslim Chinese. Introducing the work, hitherto unknown except in Chinese, in this paper I discuss how the Chinese scholar (ʿālim) Ma Zhu extols the superiority of the Prophet by utilizing traditional Islamic narratives interspersed and often tinged with elements from historical, cultural, and intellectual Chinese milieus. In so doing, I endeavor to identify common traditional Muslim narrative elements

8 Murata, Chinese 5. 9 Ibid. 3.