Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yu's Great Learning of the Pure and Real and Liu Chih's Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm.

• Author: Guo, Li
• Position: Book Review

By SACHIKO MURATA. With a new translation of Jami's Lawa'ih from the Persian by William C. Chittick. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2000. Pp. xiv + 264.

The past two decades have seen a stow, but steady, growth of studies dedicated to Islam in premodern China by scholars in the West. Most of these works have focused largely on the political and social history of Muslim communities in China, especially, following the late Joseph Fletcher's pioneering work, on Muslim rebellions under the Ch'ing empire. Recent scholarship, however, has taken a significant turn by venturing into new areas of intellectual history and theological-philosophical inquiry. With the publication of Sachiko Murata's Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light, at the beginning of the new millennium, the field has entered a new era.

This fascinating book is the first comprehensive study in a Western language on the intellectual development of Muslim scholars in premodern China. At its core is an analysis and translation of two key texts, the Great Learning of the Pure and Real (Ch'ing-chen ta-hsueh) by Wang Tai-yu (d. 1657-58?), the first Muslim thinker to write in Chinese, and Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm (Chen-ching chao-wei) by Liu Chih (ca. 1662-1730), which in turn is a Chinese interpretation, or reworking, of Abd al-Rahman Jami's (1414-1492) famous Sufi treatise Gleams (Lawa'ih). That these two texts will be of immense interest to specialists in the fields of both East Asian and Middle Eastern studies is self-evident: they not only form part of the textual basis of the Muslim intellectual tradition and ideological framework in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also bear witness to a pivotal, and intriguing, phase of Sufism's eastbound journey via Persia into China. By examining the manner in which the Chinese ulama adapted the Chinese--mainly Confucian and to a less extent Buddhism and Taoism--tradition to their own needs, and by revealing the linguistic and conceptual techniques they utilized in the process, the author has done a superb job of bringing to life not only an extremely interesting and little-known Muslim intellectual tradition outside of the Middle East, but also a fascinating chapter in the comparative study of world religion and world civilization.

The book contains an introduction and seven chapters. In the introduction, the author outlines the main contents of the book and the intellectual framework for the inquiry. Given the complex cultural milieu these Chinese ulama (categorized by Tu Weiming in his foreword as "Confucian Muslim" [p. xi]) lived in, the author is careful in an attempt to lay out what she calls "some of the commonalities" that the Muslim authors saw with other traditions (p. 7). Among these "shared features" of Neo-Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, and...