The first study in English of Islamic thought in China, this book shows that this tradition was informed by both Sufism and Neo-Confucianism; translations of two classic works are included.

The first study in English of Islamic thought in China, this book shows that this tradition was informed by both Sufism and Neo-Confucianism; translations of two classic works are included.

A translation of Wang Daiyu’s Real Commentary on the True Teaching, the first and most influential work written in the Chinese language on Islam. Published in 1642, Wang Daiyu’s Real Commentary on the True Teaching was the first significant presentation of Islam in the Chinese language by a Muslim scholar. It set the standard for the expression of Islamic theology, Sufism, and ethics in Chinese, and became the literary foundation of a school of thought that has been called “Muslim Confucianism.” In contrast to Muslim scholars writing in every other language, Wang avoided Arabic words, opting instead to reconfigure the religion in terms of Chinese concepts and categories. Employing the terminology of Neo-Confucian philosophy, his overview of Islam is thus both congenial to the mainstream Islamic tradition and reaffirms Confucian teachings about the human duty to establish harmony between heaven and earth. This book will appeal to those curious about the manner in which Islam has flourished in China over the past thousand years, as well as those interested in dialogue among religions and the significance of religious diversity.

This book constitutes a comprehensive investigation of the life and teachings of one of the most famous Sufis of the Iranian world. Simnānī spent his early life as a courtier at the Ilkhanid Mongol court and was a cherished companion of the emperor Arghun. After a mystical experience on the battlefield, he turned his back on a life of luxury and became a Sufi. He advanced rapidly in his spiritual quest and soon became one of the most influential Sufi masters in Iran. Working primarily from the most Arabic and Persian manuscripts of Simnānī’s writings, the author has analyzed Simnānī's thinking to show the overall coherence of his world-view and to demonstrate the importance of his ideas to the development of Islamic mysticism. Along with this analysis, the author provides a detailed account of Simnānī's life and times, as well as a systematic description of Simnānī's instructions for Sufi practioners of all levels.

To Rebuild the Empire provides the first complete critical study in any language of Lu Chih (Lu Hsuan-kung, 754-805), one of traditional China's most important prime ministers and a pivitol figure in T'ang dynasty China's struggle for survival toward the end of the eighth century. The work also provides an intellectual history of an era, beginning about the middle of the T'ang Dynasty (618-907), that was influential in the revival and transformation of Confucianism. Josephine Chiu-Duke reconstructs and examines both Lu Chih's intellectual commitments, as shown in his efforts to rebuild the T'ang empire, and his significance for the Confucian tradition. This book is important for its assertion of the need to look at the political dimension of the mid-T'ang Confucian revival; its presentation of a more subtle and nuanced understanding of the reconciliation of Confucian commitments and practical considerations; and its discriminating employment of more accurate concepts that help move the field of T'ang intellectual history beyond the usual moralist/pragmatist dichotomy. The work represents a welcome advance over the existing literature in any language.

Thorough, serious, yet fun to read, this is a translation of the text and an exposition of the philosophy of Chuang Tzu the Taoist of ancient China.

The Sufi tradition remains one of the most mysterious and least understood systems of self-realization. This book demystifies the practice of the sohbet—an ad hoc discourse—as the central instructional tool in the globally influential Naqshbandi-Haqqani Order. It approaches the practice using categories of improvised music to establish a framework for analyzation. Its ritualized formal structure, illustrated via selected talks of Shaykh Nazim Adil al-Haqqani, discloses the underlying—and assumingly primary—function to provoke prolonged states of raised awareness in listeners and condition their sympathetic nervous system. In an extensive discussion based on several years of field research in Cyprus, the book relates this intention to similar practices in other traditional knowledge systems by proposing psychophysical interpretations based on psychology, biochemistry, neuroscience, or quantum physics. It will appeal to scholars and students of Sufism, Islamic studies, and comparative religion, as well as those interested in performance studies and improvised music, interpersonal communication, and education.

Liu Zhi (c1662-c1730), a well-known Muslim scholar writing in Chinese, published outstanding theological works, short treatises, and short poems on Islam. While traditional Arabic and Persian Islamic texts used unfamiliar concepts to explain Islam, Liu Zhi translated both text and concepts into Chinese culture. In this erudite volume, David Lee examines how Liu Zhi integrated the basic religious living of the monotheistic Hui Muslims into their pluralistic Chinese culture. Liu Zhi discussed the Prophet Muhammad in Confucian terms, and his work served as a bridge between peoples. This book is an in-depth study of Liu Zhi's contextualization of Islam within Chinese scholarship that argues his merging of the two never deviated from the basic principles of Islamic belief.

Analyzing the intersection between Sufism and philosophy, this volume is a sweeping examination of the mystical philosophy of Muḥyī-l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 637/1240), one of the most influential and original thinkers of the Islamic world. This book systematically covers Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ontology, theology, epistemology, teleology, spiritual anthropology and eschatology. While philosophy uses deductive reasoning to discover the fundamental nature of existence and Sufism relies on spiritual experience, it was not until the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī that philosophy and Sufism converged into a single framework by elaborating spiritual doctrines in precise philosophical language. Contextualizing the historical development of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s school, the work draws from the earliest commentators of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s oeuvre, Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. ca. 730/1330) and Dawūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 751/1350), but also draws from the medieval heirs of his doctrines Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī (d. 787/1385), the pivotal intellectual and mystical figure of Persia who recast philosophical Sufism within the framework of Twelver Shīʿism and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (d. 898/1492), the key figure in the dissemination of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s ideas in the Persianate world as well as the Ottoman Empire, India, China and East Asia via Central Asia. Lucidly written and comprehensive in scope, with careful treatments of the key authors, Philosophical Sufism is a highly accessible introductory text for students and researchers interested in Islam, philosophy, religion and the Middle East.

A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism, Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that “Chinese” identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy—described as “harmony”—with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one’s position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today’s multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.