Wang Jingzhai

Wang Jingzhai (1880–1949) was a Chinese Muslim scholar from Tianjin, a leading ahong of the Republic of China and one of the four great ahongs of modern China. He served as imam of more than twenty mosques across northern China, studied at al-Azhar and performed the hajj in 1923, published the journal Yi Guang for twelve years, and translated the whole Qur'an into Chinese in three successive versions — the work for which he is best remembered. ^{1 2}

He was born beside the North Great Mosque at Tianjin, into a family of ahongs; his birth name was Wenqing and his religious name Sayr al-Din Ilyas. His father Wang Lanting began his Arabic studies when he was eight, and from 1894 he worked through the mosque-school curriculum of Arabic and elementary law, with some Persian, under a succession of ahongs — Li Changgui, Ma Yulin, Yu Mianzhai, Jin Lianrong, Liu Xukui and Hai Sifu among them. In 1905 Yu Mianzhai, by then teaching at Anyu village, invested him with the turban and gown that mark a qualified ahong, and he began a lifetime of mosque posts: Baita village and Xinbao'an, the Huashi Mosque in Beijing, Kaiyuan in Fengtian, and many more, in the north-east and the capital region. He read the new Muslim and national press avidly, briefly studied English with a Christian in Fengtian until his congregation objected, and joined the Kuomintang in 1912. ^{2 1}

In 1922, feeling his knowledge unequal to what he owed, he sailed from Tianjin with his student Ma Hongdao, funded by patrons in Taiyuan, Nanjing, Gansu and Tianjin, and entered al-Azhar; in the autumn of 1923 the two performed the hajj — where the Chinese pilgrims, forbidden to fly their national flag over their tents, had to take it down, a humiliation he never forgot — and toured Arabia and Turkey before he returned to al-Azhar alone, was made the first head of its Chinese students' section, absorbed the reformist currents of Egyptian Islam, and copied out more than six hundred Arabic works. He came home in the spring of 1924. Back in Tianjin he made his name as a reformer of the old mosque-school pattern: in 1925 he taught at the Chengda Normal School, in 1927 he founded the monthly Yi Guang at the North Great Mosque, giving it away free for twelve years, and in 1933 he led the advocacy of "following scripture and reforming customs" at the Sanyizhuang Mosque. Conservative opponents answered in 1934 with an "expel the new practice" campaign that seized the mosque by force and drove out his ally Xiao Dezhen; he fought back in print and in court, and the instigators were jailed. He went on founding translation bureaus and wartime relief associations, and in 1948 accepted the imamate of the Taipei mosque before the southern climate drove him home; he died at Guiyang on the way, on 25 May 1949, and was buried in the Hui cemetery outside the city. ²

His first Qur'an work grew out of an organised attempt of 1914–1916, when the Shandong commander Ma Liang asked him to lead a translation and he instead recruited the Cangzhou scholar Hai Jin and others; that draft was never published, and he turned to translating polemical and legal works of his own. His own full translation began in 1925: a first complete draft in four months, judged unsatisfying; a second, finished after twenty months' work in Beijing and published at Beiping in 1932 under his birth name Wang Wenqing; a mosque-school-language version completed in December 1938, destroyed by Japanese bombing in 1940 and rewritten at Chongqing by March 1941; and a vernacular version, published at Shanghai in 1946 in five thousand copies. Alongside the Qur'an he produced Arabic–Chinese dictionaries, a translation of Saadi's Gulistan as The Garden of Truth, and a shelf of articles, among them his Fifty Years of Seeking Learning, an autobiography. ^{2 1 3}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The Chinese article describes his reform programme and the campaign against his "new practice" party, and the reformist influence he absorbed in Egypt, but no text names a school, order or movement as his affiliation; 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. ^{2 4}

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