Contextualization of Sufi Spirituality in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century China: The Role of Liu Zhi (c. 1662–c. 1730) by David Lee (review)

A significant body of scholarship has developed around Liu Zhi 劉智 (ca.1662–ca.1730), a prolific Chinese Muslim scholar, and his theological, cosmological, and mystical writings. Landmark books by Jonathan Lipman and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite argued that Liu was significant not only for his extensive translations of Islamic works into Chinese, but also for his contributions to a Sino-Muslim identity rooted in both Confucian and Islamic learning.¹ Sachiko Murata’s close textual scholarship has revealed Liu’s thoroughgoing fusion of Sufi concepts of God and human nature—particularly from Jāmī, ibn ʿArabī, and al-Rāzī—with Neo-Confucian cosmology.² James Frankel has argued that Liu successfully presented the Sufi process of self-realization through the language of Neo-Confucian self-cultivation.³ In each case, Liu Zhi appears primarily as an intellectual concerned with uncovering universal truth through textual scholarship and as a cultural intermediary who sought answers on behalf of his own community to questions about belonging and identity.

David Lee’s book makes a simple but potentially significant intervention in this field: it argues on the basis of Liu Zhi’s less-studied popular didactic writings that Liu was not mainly appealing to an emergent elite Sino-Muslim identity or the concerns of Sufi mysticism, but rather was engaged in a Muslim apologetics for a Chinese audience. Liu, Lee argues, did not “sinify” Islam, but rather engaged in its “contextualization,” the reframing of preexisting concepts and arguments within a new cultural context that itself serves to refine those ideas. This depiction subtly shifts Liu’s contributions to the Sino-Muslim written tradition out of the realm of intellectual history and into the field of missiology and religious studies. Such a reframing is interesting for its potential to place Liu Zhi into dialogue with Muslim and particularly Sufi Islamizers elsewhere. Lee suggests that Liu’s example contributes to a general model of contextualization, and thus to integrating Islamic proselytization into the established literature on Christian missions.

Where other scholars have explored Liu’s more erudite scholarship on mysticism and cosmology, Lee foregrounds a set of Liu’s popular writings intended to introduce fundamental Islamic concepts. These works include his Poem of the Five Sessions of the Moon (Wu geng yue 五更月) and his primer, the Three Character Classic (San zi jing 三字經). Lee demonstrates through an analysis of the Five Sessions’ structure and imagery that it reflects a careful adaptation of Daoist poetry and Buddhist narratives to the Sufi journey of realization. Many of these same themes are expanded on in Liu’s better-known The Rules and Proprieties of Islam (Tianfang dianli 天方典禮) and The True Record of the Utmost Sage of Islam (Tianfang zhisheng shilu 天方至聖實錄). At the same time, Liu’s Three Character Classic borrows the structure of a ubiquitous Neo-Confucian didactic tool to introduce fundamental concepts in Islam. It would appear that Liu meant to address a variety of audiences, some of whom were not merely students, but potentially newcomers to Islam. Lee’s work leaves open the potential for further research into the reception of these texts.

This shift in perspective and analytical framework leads Lee to interpret Liu Zhi differently from other scholars. For example, where others depict the Hui 回 (i.e., Sino-Muslim) origin myth in Liu’s works as a reflection of the diasporic dimensions of Sino-Muslim identity and of the community’s attempts to integrate Islamic learning into Neo-Confucian study, Lee contends that Liu uses historical narrative instead to emphasize the compatibility of distinct traditions. That is, Lee understands Liu Zhi’s writing not as an attempt to assimilate Islam to Confucianism or to Chinese culture writ large, but rather to spread the message of Islam to a skeptical audience. This is [End Page 85...