Muhammad Ma Jian

Muhammad Ma Jian (1906–1978) was a Hui Chinese Muslim scholar and translator from Shadian in Yunnan, professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Peking University, whose Chinese translation of the Qur'an — completed over decades and published in full only after his death — remains the most widely used in China, adopted even by the King Fahd Holy Qur'an Printing Press for its Arabic–Chinese edition. ^{1 2}

He was born on 6 June 1906 at Shadian village in Gejiu, Yunnan, into an ordinary Hui farming family; his original names were Ma Yushu and Ma Wanqing, his courtesy name Zishi, and his religious name Muhammad Makin. His father Ma Zhongji, a devout Muslim who had made the hajj in the mid-1920s, set him first to Qur'an study under the ahongs Ma Mingfu and Wang Fuyun, and he then took the new-style schooling at Shadian and, from 1918, six years at the Chengde middle school in Kunming, where Chinese and Arabic were taught together. After two years directing his home village's primary school — work he said he did not enjoy, holding that what the Hui needed, and China needed, was education — he travelled the length of war-torn China in 1928 to study Persian under the ahong Hu Songshan at Guyuan in Ningxia, spending three years there and translating the Wiqaya and Saadi's Gulistan into Chinese. He then entered the Shanghai Islamic Normal School, the school founded by the ahong Ha Decheng. ^{2 1}

In 1931 the Chinese Hui Teaching Society sent him to Egypt, in the first group of Chinese students sponsored to study at al-Azhar; visa obstruction in Shanghai sent the party home to Kunming before they finally reached Cairo at the end of the year. He studied eight years, at al-Azhar and then at the Dar al-Ulum Arabic college, living on a scholarship of two pounds a month — his one good suit, worn through eight changes of Egyptian cabinet, was nicknamed the "eight-cabinet suit" — and in Cairo he wrote his Arabic survey of Islam in China, translated the Analects and Chinese stories into Arabic, and rendered works of Muhammad Abduh and Husayn al-Jisr into Chinese. When Japan prepared a puppet hajj mission in 1939 to win Muslim opinion, he and his fellow students wrote to Ha Decheng in Shanghai urging a counter-mission; the Nationalist government took the advice, and Ma Jian went with the Chinese students' hajj delegation to Mecca, preaching China's resistance along the way. ^{2 1 3}

He returned to China in 1939; Ha Decheng met him in Hong Kong on behalf of the Teaching Society, and the two discussed translating the Qur'an. Working in Shanghai with the Society's translation committee, he produced a classical-Chinese rendering of nine volumes in fourteen months and began a vernacular one, teaching in his home village during the war years after the Japanese put him on a blacklist. In 1946 he was appointed professor at Peking University, where he founded the Arabic programme — the first time Arabic entered Chinese higher education — and trained the next generation of Chinese Arabists. The first eight volumes of his annotated Qur'an translation appeared from 1949; he was a founding figure of the Islamic Association of China, served in the CPPCC and the National People's Congress, interpreted for Zhou Enlai at Bandung, and kept his chair through the Cultural Revolution, which killed members of his family and left him working on the translation by dictation through a magnifying glass. He died at Beijing on 16 August 1978, still revising the translation hours before his death; the complete modern-Chinese version was published by the China Social Sciences Press in 1981, and in 1987 the King Fahd Press at Medina issued it in its Arabic–Chinese edition, making it the most influential Chinese Qur'an in the world. He also translated Hitti's History of the Arabs and de Boer's History of Philosophy in Islam, and compiled an Arabic–Chinese dictionary. ^{2 1}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The English article, and the Arabic article translated from it, call him a Hui-Chinese Islamic scholar who stressed the compatibility of Marxism and Islam, and the Chinese article a Hui Muslim scholar; his youthful translation of the Wiqaya, a Hanafi legal manual, under Hu Songshan is the work of a translator, not an attestation of his own school. Wikidata's single religion value is Sunni Islam, one structured family, which does not meet the museum's two-text bar; the Sunni reading is preserved in his data record. ^{1 2 4}

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