Muhammad Ma Jian’s Qur’anic Translations and Socialist Reform in 1950s China

The 1950s in China were marked by a series of intellectual efforts to reassess the place of religion in Communist China. Chinese Muslim intellectuals participated in this effort by reinterpreting Islam as a global anti-capitalist and socialist religion, attempting to inscribe Muslims in China and across the world as revolutionary subjects of socialist modernity. This paper examines Muhammad Ma Jian’s Chinese renderings of the Qur’an, his translations of Islamic modernists such as Muhammad Abduh, as well as a series of essays he published in state newspapers in the 1950s that analyzed the compatibility between socialist reforms and Islamic tradition, including Islamic law. I read closely Ma Jian's citations and interpretations of the Qur’an in Chinese, treating his weaving of anti-imperialist and Marxist metanarratives into Quranic exegesis as a mode of negotiating orthodoxy. I analyze how Ma Jian disentangled the relationship between Islamic law, secular national law, and local Islamic custom to preserve Islamic practice in the context of national socialist reforms. Such work reflects his training as a scholar of Al-Azhar University and his familiarity with modernist methods of Quranic interpretation. His exegetical and translational work not only contributed to the theorization of Islam as a revolutionary religion befitting a socialist China but also asserted the place of Chinese Islam in global Islamic modernism. Although Muhammad Ma Jian's project was ultimately limited by an increasingly narrow range of permitted discourse, his work provides insight into the entanglements of religion, revolution, and global modernity in the twentieth century.