TRANSLATING ISLAM INTO CHINESE THOUGHT: THE HAN KITAB AS AN INTELLECTUAL PROJECT IN IMPERIAL CHINA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18592/khazanah.v24i1.19538Keywords:
Han, Islam, Confucianism, Religious, China, TiongkokAbstract
Islam has a long history in China, yet its intellectual development has often been overshadowed by studies emphasizing politics, ethnicity, and state–religion relations. This article examines the Han Kitab tradition as a distinctive intellectual project through which Muslim scholars in imperial China translated Islamic concepts into the philosophical language of Confucian thought. Rather than treating the Han Kitab as a marginal form of cultural accommodation or religious syncretism, the article argues that it represented a deliberate and systematic effort to articulate Islam within the dominant moral and epistemic framework of Chinese civilization. Focusing on the writings of Wang Daiyu and Liu Zhi, the study analyzes how central Islamic concepts, particularly divine unity (tahḥīd), religious norms (sharīʿa), and moral character (akhlāq), were rearticulated through Confucian categories such as Tian (Heaven), Li (ritual propriety), and Ren (humaneness). Employing a qualitative, literature-based approach, the article draws on leading scholarship on Islam in China to interpret the conceptual strategies developed in major Han Kitab texts. The findings show that translation in the Han Kitab tradition functioned as a form of conceptual mediation rather than theological compromise, by foregrounding ethics, ritual discipline, and moral cultivation, Han Kitab scholars presented Islam as a coherent intellectual and moral tradition capable of participating in the ethical discourse of imperial China. The study contributes to broader discussions of Islamic intellectual history by demonstrating how claims to religious universality have been sustained through translation, interpretation, and engagement with distinct civilizational vocabularies.
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