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Jāmī and His Texts in China Proper

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Jāmī and His Texts in China Proper chapter 14 Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper Yiming Shen From the fifteenth century, during which Jāmī gradually grew into a prolific Sufi writer, to the late seventeenth century, when his works were translated into Chinese by Chinese Muslims, the three-hundred-year time gap and the distance of thousands of miles concealed a progress of dissemination and ac- ceptance of Jāmī’s works eastwards toward China. Considering the abundance of literary and religious works produced before the seventeenth century in and beyond Central Asia, there must be particular reasons why two of Jāmī’s works survived in this competitive environment of cultural transformation. How and when Jāmī’s works were brought to and disseminated within China proper1 is not precisely known. To account for the identity of those book carriers—academically known as cultural agents—two strands of explanation come readily to mind: a) the eastwards expansion of the Naqshbandiyya order from northwest China and b) individual Muslim travel- lers coming by land and sea. As Charles L. Ogilvie (1881–1919)2 reported in 1918, Chinese Muslims had “no distributing centre in China or book-shops, where it is possible to secure their books.”3 According to the genealogy of Chinese Muslim scholars, they in fact travelled around China seeking original manu- scripts and meeting up with foreign Muslim masters. As a result, we notice that Liu Zhi’s 劉智 (about 1655–1745) two well-known Caiji jingshumu 採輯經書目 (Catalogue of collected and compiled scriptures)4 made at the beginning of the eighteenth century indicate a variety of origi- nal Islamic scriptures disseminated in China proper and possessed by Chinese Muslims. A total of about sixty-six titles listed in these Chinese bibliographies are identified. These original scriptures were written in different languages (Persian and Arabic) and can be categorised according to a wide range of 1 China proper in this article refers to the territory of China, especially central and east China where Han nationality live as a majority and Chinese is the common language. 2 Charles L. Ogilvie was an American missionary who came to China in 1911. 3 Charles. L. Ogilvie, “A Classified Bibliography of Books on Islam in Chinese and Chinese- Arabic,” The Moslem World 8 (1918): 74. 4 The two catalogues are presented in Liu Zhi’s Tianfang xingli and Tianfang dianli respective- ly. Each has about forty Persian and Arabic texts under their transcription titles and transla- tion titles. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_016 Jāmī and his Texts in China Proper 425 subjects (grammar, theology, Sufism or even science) and literary forms (po- etry and prose).5 Moreover, the Sufi texts in these two catalogues consist of different Sufi teachings such as Naqshbandiyya, Kubrawiyya and so on. Coincidently, based on the catalogue provided by an ahong (Chinese Muslim “cleric,” from the Persian ākhund) in the Sanlihe mosque in Beijing in 1908, René Ristelhueber (1881–1960), a French diplomat and writer, reported that the collection of this ahong had approximately one hundred and fifty Arabic and Persian books on various subjects such as grammar, lexicography, theology, jurisprudence and Sufism.6 At least five Sufi texts, including Jāmī’s Ashiʿat al- Lamaʿāt, have been identified and as far as we can tell Ashiʿat al-Lamaʿāt is the only text which was translated into Chinese.7 Such complexity of manuscripts disseminated among Chinese Muslims in- dicates the opportunities for book transport from Central Asia to China prop- er. Although the number of foreign Muslim travellers in China proper could not compare with the expansive population of the Naqshbandiyya order in northwest China, it seems that those individual visitors, namely merchants and Muslim missionaries, overshadowed the influence of Naqshbandiyya in China proper and functioned as “cultural agents” by continually bringing Islamic scriptures to the hands of Chinese Muslims. In other words, despite the important influence of Jāmī’s works in the development of Naqshbandiyya order, the transport of Jāmī’s texts from Central Asia to China proper from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries seems to have been likely affected by his reader’s individual preferences rather than empowered by any Islamic reli- gious organization. This article is divided into two parts. First, I will introduce the intellectu- al biographies of our two Chinese translators of Jāmī’s treatises, namely She Qiling and Liu Zhi. Then I will discuss the terminology and language of these two Chinese translations based on textual comparison. 5 See Donald D. Leslie, “Arabic and Persian Sources Used by Liu Chih,” Central Asiatic Journal 26 (1982): 78–104. 6 Lucien Bouvat, “Une bibliothèque de mosquée chinoise,” Revue du monde musulman 4 (1908): 516. 7 Martin Hartmann, “Littérature des musulmans chinois,” Revue du monde musulman 5 (1908): 278..
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