Ma Linyi

Ma Linyi (1864–1938) was a Chinese Muslim educator and politician from Baoqing in Hunan, a Hui scholar of Islam who rose through the education administration of the late Qing and the Republic: he took charge of education in Gansu in 1912, founded the Association for the Promoting of Islamic Teaching in the provincial capital in 1918, headed education in Anhui and Zhili, and served as vice-minister of education in Beijing. ^{1 2}

He passed the provincial imperial examination in 1901, then studied in Japan at the Kobun Institute, joined the Tongmenghui in 1905 and returned to China the same year. Under the Qing he served in the Ministry of Education and in the office preparing constitutional government, and was counted with Yan Xiu and Fan Jing as one of the ministry's three outstanding men. After the Republic was founded he was a councillor of the Beiyang Ministry of Education, president of the Chinese Muslim Advancement Association, and Gansu's education commissioner — the office later renamed director-general of education — besides a circuit intendancy in the province; in 1917 he became director of the Gansu provincial education department, and he later held the same office for Anhui and for Zhili. In 1921 he was vice-minister of education, and afterwards director of the Beijing Library; under the Nationalist government he worked in the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, as its Beiping office director, a commission member and principal of its school, and in the 1930s as principal of the Beiping People's University and of North China College, an adviser to the Executive Yuan and a member of the Examination Commission. ²

His founding of the Association for the Promoting of Islamic Teaching in 1918, in the capital of Gansu, where he directed the province's schools, is the act for which the English and Arabic articles chiefly remember him, and his writings include an Outline of Islam alongside works on education and history. It was also in his Gansu administration that the young ahong Da Pusheng was appointed to direct the province's Hui education-promotion office, as Da Pusheng's own Chinese article records. ^{1 3 4}

The English article, followed by its Arabic translation, adds that in 1921 he and General Ma Fuxiang sponsored the imam Wang Jingzhai's hajj to Mecca. Wang Jingzhai's own Chinese article tells the journey differently — a departure in 1922, support from four named patrons, and the hajj in the autumn of 1923 — so the sponsorship is reported here as the English article's claim, not written as a relation in either man's record. ^{1 5}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The English article calls him a Chinese Muslim, the Chinese article a Hui educator and Islamic scholar, and Wikidata's religion value is Islam in general; no source names a school, order or movement for him, and Hui identity and an Islamic-studies career are not the attestation of a school. ^{1 2 6}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.