The Islamic School of Jingxue: Chinese Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islamic Scriptures through Evidentiary Scholarship in Late Imperial China

Although Islam entered China in the fifth century, during the Ming dynasty Muslim communities in China underwent an intense process of localization resulting in the development of a unique Chinese Muslim identity. Commensurate to this new sense of identity, extant scholarship has contended that Hu Dengzhou (1522-1597) initiated formal Islamic education in China. However, as shown through this paper’s investigation of historical materials such as the Jingxue xichuanpu [Genealogy of Chinese Islamic Teaching (1713)] and local gazetteers, numerous groups of Muslim intellectuals endeavored to establish and dictate the contours of Chinese Islamic scholarship and education during the late Ming and the early Qing, among which Hu Dengzhou’s Jingxue school was only one part. Within this highly competitive intellectual milieu, the Jingxue scholars, however, particularly emphasized the exegesis, interpretation, and translation of Arabic and Persian Islamic scriptures. In their efforts, they demonstrated similar epistemological concerns and scholarly methodologies as the kaozheng studies and evidentiary scholarship then prominent among their non-Muslim Confucian counterparts. Using both historical and textual studies approaches, this paper not only elucidates the emergence and development of the Islamic Jingxue school, but also explores the sociopolitical and intellectual stakes of these academic contestations. Finally, it demonstrates how this school obtained authority over its rivals by legitimating the use of Chinese sources—in addition to Arabic and Persian ones—for interpreting Islamic scriptures, thereby expanding its interlocutors to include Muslims who were unable to read Arabic or Persian, as well as non-Muslim Chinese scholars.