Islam During The Ming Dynasty - Muslim Scholarship

Muslim Scholarship

The era saw Nanjing become an important center of Islamic study. From there Wang Daiyu wrote Zhengjiao zhenquan (A Commentary on the Orthodox Faith), while his successor, Liu Zhi, translated Tianfang xingli (Islamic Philosophy) Tianfang dianli (Islamic Ritual) and Tianfang zhisheng shilu (The Last Prophet of Islam). Another scholar, Hu Dengzhou started a rigorous Islamic school in Nanjing, which taught hadith, the Qur'an, and Islamic law. The school grew into a fourteen-course system, with classes in Arabic and Persian. Other provinces had different systems and different specializations; Lintao and Hezhou provinces had a three-tier educational system in which the youngest children learned the Arabic required for namaz and wudu, and then graduated to more advanced studies. Shandong province became a center specialized in Persian texts. As the Hui Muslim community became more diluted, Chinese scholars worked harder to translate texts into Chinese to both provide more texts for Muslims to convince the ruling Han elite that Islam was not inferior to Confucianism.

The work of Islamic geographers which had reached China during the Yuan Dynasty was used in the Ming Dynasty to draw the Western Regions in the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu, the oldest surviving world map from East Asia. Meanwhile further west, Arabic storytellers were narrating fantastical stories of China, which were incorporated into the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), the most famous being the story of Aladdin. Other Arabian Nights tales set in China include "Tale of Qamar al-Zaman and Budur", "The Story of Prince Sayf al-Muluk", and "The Hunchback's Tale" story cycle.