Liu Zhi

Liu Zhi (c. 1660 – c. 1739), also written Liu Chih, was a Chinese Muslim scholar of Nanjing under the Qing dynasty and the most prominent of the Han Kitab writers — the Hui scholars who explained Islam in the language of Chinese thought, borrowing terms from Buddhism, Daoism and above all Neo-Confucianism and aligning them with Islamic concepts ¹. His Tianfang Xingli, on the nature and principle of Islam, was considered the authoritative exposition of the faith in Chinese and was republished twenty-five times between 1760 and 1939 ^{1 2}.

Liu Zhi was born into a scholarly family of Nanjing around 1660 — the sources give the year as circa, and modern scholarship places him as late as about 1670 ^{1 3 4}. His father, Liu Sanjie, instructed him in childhood; at twelve he studied scripture with Yuan Ruqi at the Garden of Military Studies Mosque in Nanjing, and from fifteen he studied at home for fifteen years across Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism and Western learning ^{1 3}. He held that Confucius and Mencius were sages of the East and Muhammad a sage of the West, and that the teachings of the sages of East and West, in his time as in antiquity, are one ¹. From about the age of thirty he lived at the foot of Qingliangshan in Nanjing, in his studio Saoyelou, the House of Sweeping Leaves, interpreting the Islamic scriptures through Confucian studies, and he travelled widely in China seeking comment on his manuscripts ¹. After his death around 1739 his tomb in Nanjing became a place of pilgrimage for Chinese Muslims, visited by thousands every year ¹.

He learned Arabic and Persian and wrote across his whole life ¹. His three best-known works are the Tianfang Xingli (Nature and Principle in Islam), the Tianfang Dianli (The Rites of Islam) and the Tianfang Zhisheng Shilu (The Real Record of the Last Prophet of Islam), the last translated into English by Isaac Mason in 1921 as The Arabian Prophet ^{1 3}. His writings entered the Han Kitab, the body of Chinese-language literature that synthesised Islam and Confucianism ¹.

The English and Urdu articles describe Liu Zhi in their leads as a Sunni Hanafi-Maturidi scholar ^{1 2}, and scholarship on the Han Kitab presents the tradition he led, and the ritual law his Tianfang Dianli expounds, as Hanafi in orientation. The two article leads, however, follow one another so closely that they read as a single source family, and no second independent text names a school for the man himself; his works' deep engagement with Sufi metaphysics is likewise not a personal discipleship, and none is attested for him. His faith is therefore recorded as unknown, with the Hanafi-Maturidi characterization stated in full rather than settled ⁴.