“ Like the Hebrews in Spain ” : The Jesuit Encounter with Muslims in China and the Problem of Cultural Change

This essay is concerned with the possibility of cultural change in the writings of Matteo Ricci. In order to elucidate this question, this essay discusses aspects of Matteo Ricci’s perception of Islam and Muslims in China and identifies the moments when they changed. I show that over time Ricci developed a much more nuanced perception of Islam in China, but argue still that his views remained quite limited because of lack of dialogue with Muslims he saw in China. These limitations, I also argue, reflect the limitations of European views of Islam in the early modern EuroMediterranean world. Recognizing these limitations, I suggest, might help us to develop new approaches to questions of religion in early modern China.


A Muslim Woman from the West
Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) liked playing with words, and Chinese characters provided him with many opportunities to do just that.One example is found in "Xiguo jifa" ("Ars Memorativa of the Western Kingdoms"), a celebrated essay on mnemonics that the Jesuit missionary to China wrote in 1596 at the behest of some Chinese officials he had befriended.At one point in the essay, Ricci uses Muslims as an aide-mémoire.He creatively shows how huihui 回回-a Chinese term used for Jews, Nestorian Christians, but mostly for Muslims at that time-can be morphed into the character yao 要, thus evoking the concept of "a woman from Xixia who is a Muslim" (以"要"字取西夏回 回女子之象). 1 Jonathan Spence suggests that Ricci probably saw multiple linkages between words and concepts such as "woman," "West," "Jews," "Nestorians," and "Muslims." 2 Strictly speaking, this hidden set of linkages could mean that the top part of yao (the ideograph xi 西, "west") and the bottom part (nu 女, "woman") carried with it the image of a woman from the western kingdom Xixia 西夏, an offshoot of the Tangut Empire that was located on the western side of the Huang He (Yellow River) in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries.But as Spence explains, Xixia in this context denotes the northwest-a territory that by Ricci's time was home to large Muslim communities. 3This is why we conclude that the woman in Ricci's essay on mnemonics must be Muslim.
All of this makes sense, but one big question remains: why does Ricci insist that the woman from Xixia is a Muslim, instead of simply referring to a "woman from Xixia" or a "woman from the West" (as the character itself suggests)?Spence proposes that the religious element in this little mnemonic trick should remind us that the character yao carries, among other meanings, the nuances of importance and duty. 4This could make yao close to what we might consider religion 504 ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE Al-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015 1 Ricci (Li Madou), "Xiguo jifa," in Ricci, Li Madou Zhongwen zhuyi ji, pp.141-168  (quote found in p. 146).Ricci's essay was made famous in the West by Spence in the The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
was only the chief and the most powerful, not merely the Prophet." 9 Similarly, Gloria Allaire points to "an almost total lack of distinction between the terms 'Saracen' and 'pagan' in early Italian chivalric texts." 10 Ricci must have known such texts, and they were probably among the most important sources of information about Islam available to him.Finally, one must always remember that the encounter between certain individuals-Ricci and an occasional Chinese interlocutor, for example-was really just that, an exchange between two human beings who did not represent entire civilizations. 11In short, in Ricci's time, it was not easy to imagine Islam as part of the monotheist trio of the great world religions, let alone position it vis-à-vis another trio of East Asian religions.The question of how Ricci saw Muslims and Islam in China, therefore, remains open.
One should be more puzzled about the choice Ricci makes for a mnemonic trick after realizing that the great dialoguer apparently never had a conversation, let alone an intimate dialogue, with a Muslim person in China. 12The only record of a direct encounter between Ricci and a Muslim refers to a meeting Ricci had in 1602 in Beijing, when he ran into a group of visiting foreign Muslim merchants.One of the merchants told Ricci that in the northwest there were some white men who seemed to be Christian.Ricci was interested and attempted to organize an expedition to the northwest, but he failed.Later it was discovered that those people in the northwest were Nestorians.Ricci does not mention any conversation with the Muslim merchants other than the one about the possibility of Christians living somewhere in the northwest. 13In contrast, an exciting episode occurred in 1605 when Ricci was in Nanjing and heard about a Chinese Jew who was visiting the city.He arranged to meet the "Jew Ai" and interviewed him for a long time about his beliefs, knowledge of Hebrew and scriptures, and religious rites.The scene was a bit comical: the Jew Ai came to see Ricci expecting to meet a fellow Jew, and when Ricci showed him a painting of Mary with Jesus and the John the Baptist, he quickly identified them as Rebecca and Jacob and other (Hebrew) biblical figures. 14nd yet Ricci never spoke with a representative of the Chinese Muslims, a much larger group than the Chinese Jews.But Ricci's odd choice for the above-mentioned mnemonic trick certainly shows that Muslims-and not a notion of Islam, as Spence seems to suggestwere very much on Ricci's mind when he interacted with his Confucian interlocutors.In this regard, the image of the Muslim woman from the West serves as an invitation to think about how the early Jesuits, chief among them Ricci himself, viewed Muslims in China.Such an exercise has a great deal of worth, I would argue, because it offers us a unique European view of Islam and Muslims in the very early modern period and in an unfamiliar setting.In the setting discussed here, the encounter between Christian Europeans and Muslims does not take place in the site where it has been taking place for the centuries since the rise of Islam-the Euro-Mediterranean world.Rather, it takes place far from there, in China, where the power relations that characterized European-Muslim encounters and exchanges did not exist.Instead, both sides, Christian and Muslim, were powerless, and seemed to be displaced.Thus, the Jesuit encounter with Muslims in China is worth looking at precisely because it is far removed-geographically, politically, militarily, economically, and culturally-from the place where the parameters through which we examine the relationship between Islam and the West have been under construction or centuries.Simply put, it is an encounter between Europeans and Muslims both before and outside notions of Islam and the West as we know them today and as we project them back into the past came to be. 15   Al-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015one should ask how did the first Jesuits to come to China recognized the Muslims they saw there, and how they wrote about those Muslims.
This essay presents two ways in which Jesuits recognized Muslims: as the familiar rivals or enemies of Europeans, and as residents of China. 16It also asks how Jesuits made sense of the Muslim presence in China.In what follows, I present some comments on Islam and Muslims by two early Jesuit missionaries to China.I focus mostly on Ricci, looking at several letters he wrote and some jottings he made in his major opus Della entrata della Compagnia di Giesú e Christianità nella Cina.The second source is the Portuguese father Álvaro Semedo (1586-1658 or 1659) who arrived in China at the time of Ricci's death. in 1610.Like Ricci shortly before him, Semedo also wrote lengthy reports on China in which he discussed various aspects of the country and its society.Both Semedo and Ricci wrote during the first stages of Jesuit presence in China and were struggling to understand the country, its society, its culture, and its Muslims.Like Ricci, Semedo endeavored hard to settle in China and greatly was affected because of the fragile status of the Jesuit order there.Semedo was even imprisoned by the Chinese authorities at some point in 1613 and had to reenter the country after changing his Chinese name. 17Semedo's still largely neglected account, Imperio de la China: I cultura evangelica en èl, por los religios de la Compaia de Iesus, is in part a rendering of Ricci's Della Entrata into Spanish, but it is also Semedo's own representation of China. 18He not only translated Ricci's account, often making direct references to Ricci, but he also changed and adapted it.In many cases, Semedo added a great deal from his experiences.In this regard, I read Semedo's Imperio de la China as a commentary on Ricci, and I use it here with Ricci's account to highlight certain issues in Ricci's text.

Strangers and Familiar Strangers in China
The case of the Muslim woman from the West brings to the fore other issues.Let us recall, again, that Ricci wrote the Xiguo jifa as a service for Chinese interlocutors interested in European Ars Memorativa.When he invokes the Muslim woman from the west, he knows that his Chinese counterparts are very familiar with Muslims.After all, Ricci uses the word "Muslim" in this context as part of a mnemonic trick, something that could help his counterparts remember things quickly and easily.This suggests that they were intimately familiar with Muslims.It is also very clear that Ricci was deeply aware of this intimate awareness.In other words, the settings of the first Jesuit encounters with Muslims in China are quite complicated.They take place outside Europe, in a location where Jesuits engage in a dialogue with another culture-the Chinese-for whose members the Muslims are familiar, while the Europeans are strangers.What is more, it is very clear to Ricci that Muslims are familiar to the Chinese in a way that differs from the way Europeans recognize Muslims.The cultural context in which Ricci and Semedo observe Islam is therefore complicated.The encounter with Muslims occurs within several sets of oppositions, if you will.On the one hand, there is the Christian-Muslim one.On the other hand, there is the Christian-Chinese one, with the Muslims in the middle, as it were.Finally, there is always the Chinese-Muslim context as well, and-as I will suggest below-a Jewish-Christian context is also at play here.
What of the Muslim side itself?The scope and thrust of this essay do not allow or necessitate a detailed discussion of the way in which Chinese Muslims saw Jesuits.I have shown elsewhere that some Muslims in China paid a great deal of attention to the presence of Jesuits there.But they did not view them as Europeans.Moreover, Muslim interest in Jesuit writings arose only long after some of the fathers began publishing books in Chinese attempting to reconcile what they saw as Chinese culture with the Christian divinity.I have stressed that Muslim interest in Jesuits was limited to a number of intellectuals who were engaged in a similar, albeit still very different, project that was launched during the early 1600s and peaked about a century later.I have also emphasized the fact that Muslim interest in Jesuit work was limited to doctrinal issues.In other words, Chinese Muslims were not interested in the Jesuits as representatives of a specific ethnic or social category, as Europeans, or as "Christians."They saw the Jesuits as proponents of very specific theological issues that mattered to them as well-namely, how to represent a monotheist universal divinity, such as the Western god Allah, in Chinese terms.In fact, the Europeanness or the Christianity of the Jesuits never mattered to Chinese Muslims. 19Conversely, as we shall see below, the first Jesuits in China took a special interest in the presence of Muslims in China from the moment they arrived in the country.Moreover, Jesuit observations of Muslims in China were concerned with radically different questions.Their interests were first more concerned with the ethnicity of the Muslims and only later with their religion, however they defined it.Religion was first absent from the way in which Jesuits thought and wrote about Muslims.It mattered less as an arena for Jesuit inquiries about Muslim religiosity and more as the factor that determined their ethnic status.In simple terms, the Muslimness of the Muslims in China mattered only inasmuch as it determined their Chineseness or lack thereof.This, I would argue, gave rise to a certain ambiguity about Chinese Muslims-an attitude that does not perceive them as Chinese but as strangers to varying degrees because of their religion.
Some general comments about the historical backdrop are also necessary.The Muslims in China, although understood as a more or less distinct collectivity, were considered an integral part of the population and have been living in China for many centuries. 20There were also foreign Muslims-coming as ambassadors from Central Asian locales known to the government of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644)-who were indeed foreign, but also familiar to the Chinese. 21European Catholics were a different story.The last decades of the sixteenth century were the beginning of what is aptly called the Catholic Century in the East Asian region east of the Strait of Malacca. 22Catholicism, in the form both of trade sponsored by Catholic empires and of missionizing orders, expanded into China during the period.Spain and Portugal began a long stretch of dominance over trade in the Indian Ocean, the Sea of Japan, and the China Sea.Along with the merchants came Jesuit fathers on their way to undertake missionary work in India, China, Korea, and Japan. 23In the 1540s, shortly after the establishment of the order, the first Jesuits were already establishing footholds in India; they did the same a bit later in Japan.Conveniently for the Jesuits, both Japan and India were torn at the time by civil wars and political fragmentation. 24hina, under the tight and unified control of the Ming government, seemed pretty much out of bounds for foreigners, and it took the Jesuits much longer to reach its hinterland. 25This policy was not the Chinese attitude towards all foreigners, but-and this is crucial-it was toward people who belonged to nations that the Chinese did not recognize or know through past records.Many in the Ming government "seem to have believed that no embassy should be accepted from a ruler who had not been enrolled among the tributary states in the first reigns of the dynasty."26Europeans, therefore, were doubly removed from China-as foreigners and especially as strangers unknown in the outer Chinese world.Jesuit fathers, like other foreigners coming from afar, were equally affected by this attitude, at least at first.Only in 1601, almost twenty years after the first fathers entered China disguised as Buddhist priests, was Ricci, their leader, granted permission to reside in the capital, Beijing. 27Other Jesuits were permitted to settle in other major cities such as Kaifeng, Nanjing, and Hangzhou.The long early years of the Jesuits' tenure in China were accompanied by rigorous study of the Chinese language and literary classics and culminated, in 1594, in the symbolic act of dressing as Confucian mandarins.It is important to note that the Jesuits' status in China remained fragile for several decades after their arrival.In fact, their presence became firmly established only much later, during the early days of the Kangxi emperor (r.1662-1622) of the Qing dynasty.This was only after they had managed to prove the superiority of their science over that of the Chinese. 28While still hoping to convert the Chinese to Catholicism, the Jesuits had come to admire China's culture and its learned elite. 29To foster the success of their mission, Jesuits in China not only changed their physical appearance, but they also changed the appearance of their doctrines, intentionally melding them with concepts more familiar to the Chinese.Jesuits immersed themselves in the study of the Chinese classics to be better able to dialogue with their Chinese Confucian counterparts.To that end, the Jesuits generated a large volume of literature about Christianity in Chinese and struggled with the impossible task of translating Christianity into Chinese. 30Furthermore, the Jesuits allowed Chinese converts to Christianity to continue some Chinese ritual practices, a policy that gave rise to the famous Chinese rites controversy in the Vatican and elsewhere in Europe.Thus, cultural change and adaptation came to be seen by Jesuits, from Ricci on, as key to their success in living in China.
In this regard, I would argue, the comfortable presence of Muslims in China was puzzling in Jesuit eyes.Chinese Muslims spoke Chinese, participated in elite cultural life, and seemed, in fact, to be "real" Chinese, which presented the early Jesuit missionaries to China with a dilemma that mattered to them a great deal.The Jesuits encountered Muslims not only in the cities but also, most significantly and sometimes troublingly, at court-their own prime target.The Jesuits were focused on consolidating their power at court, a venture they believed was key to their ultimate success in the mission to win China over to Christianity. 31 dants of the Islamic astronomers brought to China by the Mongols, a group who now formed what was called the Muslim school in the Chinese Bureau of Astronomy. 32Ricci was so struck by this Muslim presence that in his major work on China and Chinese culture, he dedicated a whole section to Muslim court astronomers. 33Indeed, in many Chinese urban centers the Jesuits encountered many members of the well-educated Chinese Muslim merchant and gentry elite. 34As we shall see, these successfully Chinese Muslims were vexing to the Jesuits, but at the same time, they presented the possibility of success for the Jesuit project.The assumption was that Muslims-like the Jesuits, at least initially-also had the goal of a mass infiltration and conversion of the land (to Islam in their case, of course).What had become of that project?So it was that study of China's Muslims, considered a largely irrelevant curiosity by later scholars, became central to various early Christian efforts to understand and come to terms with China.
We can now better understand the possible context for the Muslim woman from the West in Ricci's "Ars Memorativa of the Western Kingdoms."Ricci must have been very conscious of the presence of Muslims in China, and at same time he was fully aware of the fact that his Chinese interlocutors were very familiar with the Muslims and had their own terminology for them.It was clear to him that the Chinese Muslims were fully at home in China. 35In sharp contrast, the Jesuits had to go through many ordeals to enter and settle in the country. 36The questions of how and for what purpose Muslims had first come to China puzzled Ricci, who understood his own purpose clearly and in explicitly missionary terms.Furthermore, Ricci struggled with two, not just one, categories of Muslims.One was the familiar European designation of Moors or Saracens, which Ricci used in reference to the Chinese Muslims.The second, as we have seen already, was the Chinese designator for Muslims, huihui.This point is significant.Whereas "Moors" and "Saracens" were references for Muslims imported from the European reality and imagination, "huihui" was a term that emerged in China and out of a specific Chinese context.Ricci was probably the first European who had to contend with this duality. 37On the one hand, Muslims were considered decidedly outside the Chinese world.On the other hand, reality showed the Jesuits that the Muslims were definitely part of this world.This contrast, I would argue, characterizes all early Jesuit reports on Muslims in China, particularly Ricci's.

"Self-Planted" Muslims
On September 13th, 1584-less than a year after his arrival in China, and when he was still staying in the small southern Chinese town of Zhaoqing, near Canton-Ricci noted in a letter that he "had no idea" how to understand Muslim presence in China-or in his words: how they "self-planted" in China.The letter, written to Giambattista Román (Juan Bautista Román), the Spanish procurator in the Philippines who was then residing in Macao, was one of the early lengthy reports on China that Ricci produced.In the letter, Ricci recounted and explained all that he and his companion, Michele Ruggieri, had done in China since entering the country about two years earlier.
Ricci therefore took the time to describe China for the distinguished Spaniard, and the letter included one of the earliest reports he made on religious life in China.The language of the passage in which the Mus-lims are mentioned is telling: "The Chinese are divided into three sects, not including sects, and without that of the Muslims … which I do not know how, planted themselves among them." 38Implicitly at least, Ricci includes the Muslims among the large religious sects he encounters in China.But he explicitly does not count them as Chinese.Islam is clearly a different category, and Ricci struggles with it.He tells us explicitly that he "do[es] not know how" (no sé como) the Muslims "had planted themselves" in China.Evidently, Ricci had to acknowledge that they were pretty much at home-they were "planted" in the country.The word "planted" is quite strong (the verb "sembrar" also means becoming cemented).It implies that the Muslims Ricci saw were quite at home in China.Ricci's use of a reflexive verb also suggests that he is quite suspicious of what he saw and is wondering what kind of a cultural process produced the Muslims he saw.More importantly, Ricci's remark about not knowing how the Muslims became "planted" in China strongly suggests that beyond suspicion and curiosity, they presented him with a challenge: after all, his mission was "planting" Christianity in the same place among the Chinese.How the Muslims did it, and to what extent, were therefore crucial questions.
Semedo's more detailed account of the Muslims of China provides us with a glimpse of what Ricci saw, the sight that made him so suspicious and curious.Semedo describes the Muslims thus: "There are moreover in China, Moors in great abundance, not in all the Provinces, nor in every City, but yet in the more principal [ones].They speak the language of the Country, and know nothing of their own tongue, a few words only excepted.… In their Physiognomy, nose, eyes, beard and face they are altogether like the Chinese" (emphasis added). 39his passage helps clarify Ricci's first observations of Muslim made few decades before.This written only a few decades after Ricci's visit to Canton, where he first saw Chinese Muslims, and the reality it depicts could be easily taken as reflecting conditions in the late sixteenth century as well. 40These Muslims are not the Arabic-speaking and Arab-looking Saracens of the Euro-Mediterranean world.The language is clear: the Muslims "speak the language of the country" and "in their physiognomy" they cannot be distinguished from the rest of the Chinese (La forma del rostro, en todo como la Chinas).No wonder, then, why Ricci used the word "planted."In sharp contrast with Semedo's rather dispassionate, well-informed depiction of Muslims, Ricci was quite hostile to them at first and would not allow that they were Chinese.The first mention of Muslims that Ricci made in his diaries, written about two years before the letter to Román quoted above, shows that he was convinced that the numerous Muslims in Cantona major port city that controlled Portugal's base in Macao-were spreading rumors that the recently arriving Portuguese were the front guard of a violent Christian European conquering force.Ricci correctly observed the tensions between the Chinese and the Portuguese in Canton.But he incorrectly chose to blame them on the Cantonese Muslims: "Igniting this fire [are the] many Mohammedan Saracens, who live in the city of Canton, who promptly told the Chinese that these men from Frankia, as the Mohammedans call the Christians of Europe (and since the Chinese cannot pronounce the letter r, because it does not exist in their language, they came to call them till now Falanchi …), are valiant men, conquerors of other peoples' kingdoms, knowing already that they had subjected by military power Malaca and other Indian kingdoms" 41 There is a marvelous historical irony attached to the great powers of foreknowledge that Ricci attributed to those Chinese Muslims of the late sixteenth century.Hindsight makes it seem that they were able fo- resee the exploits of Europeans powers in East Asia in the years to come.its contemporary context, too, the passage in that it shows that the Chinese in Canton, who more than anyone else in China at the time were exposed to the presence of Europeans, deployed (an albeit sinified version of) a quintessentially Islamic idiom when referring to the Portuguese (ai Cinesi esser questa gente de'Franchi): they referred to them as "Franks."This point is significant.In effect, Ricci's argument was that the Chinese in Canton saw the Europeans through Muslim eyes, through a Muslim gaze that since the time of the Crusades had associated Europeans with the image of the aggressive Frankish conqueror.Thus the old rivalry between "Saracens" (the term Ricci reserves for the Chinese Muslims) and "Franks" is reenacted on Chinese soil, itself an Orient, which becomes a space where an Occidental entity (the Franks) engages in a mighty fight with an Oriental entity (the Saracens).According to Ricci's depiction, though, this image is generated by the Muslims alone.They "ignited this fire," says Ricci, and they are ones who warned that the Portuguese are conquerors in disguise, preparing for a forthcoming military invasion.I have showed elsewhere that this is a blatant lie and that the Muslims of Canton could not have done what Ricci says they did. 42More important for our purposes here, I have explained that Ricci's use of the word "Franks" and the way in which he specifically explains it in this passage suggest that he saw the Muslims as the same rivals from the old and familiar Euro-Mediterranean world, where Muslim Saracens and Christian Franks had clashed for centuries. 43As we shall see below and as we can already infer from what I have presented above, Ricci later changed his mind about the potential Islamic threat to Jesuit and European plans for China.But it is important to note that when he first entered China, he clearly saw the Muslims as the quintessential enemies, at least rivals, of European Christians.Furthermore, Ricci refers to the Chinese Muslims in ethnic rather than religious terms.He calls them Saracens (saraceni) and describes their rivalry with the Europeans in political, rather than religious or theological, terms.

Chinese until Pork Is Served
Ricci's of Muslims presented and discussed above was created during the early 1580s, pretty much his arrival in China.It is puzzling perception.How could Ricci see Muslims whoas Semedo describes them-"look Chinese" both in terms of their "physiognomy" and dress, speak Chinese, and behave like Chinese and still insist that they are Saracens?It is true that Semedo also uses European terminology for Muslims and refers to them as "Moors."But he clearly recognizes that the Moors he sees are not the Moors from Spain or North Africa.Conversely, Ricci's Saracens are depicted like the Saracens back home.They are hostile to Europeans and are big liars.Ricci does not spend much time thinking about their cultural status or ethnicity-even though, as we have seen in his letter to Román, he is fully aware of the Chineseness of these Muslims.Evidently, the passages above represent Ricci's inability to register, understand, and express cultural change.I would argue that what is truly missing in Ricci's mind is the possibility of cultural change when it comes to Islam.This lacuna dictates the way in which he records his first observations of Muslims in China and describes them pretty much like the old familiar Saracen rivals from back home.Over twenty years after he wrote the abovementioned letter, sometime between 1605 and 1608, Ricci completely changed his views on Muslims and expressed his new opinion in another long passage.This passage was in fact his final assessment of Chinese Islam, and it was very different than the first two comments presented above.In a discussion of Chinese religions, when speaking of the "evil" of "Chinese idolatry," Ricci suddenly digresses and relates the following tale: This evil [Chinese idolatry] is joined by another.Since in the far western regions China borders on Persia, at various times many followers of Mohammedan law entered this country, and their children and descendants multiplied so much that they have spread over all China with thousands of families.They are residing in nearly all provinces, where they have sumptuous mosques, recite their prayers, are circumcised, and conduct their ceremonies.But as far as we know, they do not disseminate [their faith], nor do they try to obtain [converts], or to publicize their faith, and [they] live subject to Chinese laws and in great ignorance of their [the Chinese] sect, and are held in low opinion by the Chinese.For these reasons, they treated as native Chinese, and not being suspected of plotting rebellion, they are allowed to study [the Confucian classics] and enter the ranks [of the] bureaucracy.-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015Many of them, having received official rank, abandon their old beliefs, retaining only their against eating pork, to which they have never accustomed. 44e passage quoted the first broad account of Chinese Islam and Chinese Muslims that he wrote since his first comments, mentioned above.The differences between this report and the earlier ones are striking.Note first the change in tone.In the 1580s Ricci "did not know how" how the Muslims had "planted" themselves in and among the Chinese, and he was quite hostile to the Muslims.Twenty years later he explains how, when, and why they arrived in China.Muslims had "entered" China over the course of generations simply because of the geographical proximity of the Persianate world to China's northwestern borders.The Muslims had since multiplied, not by proselytizing but through natural reproduction.The Muslim infiltration of all provinces is nothing but a simple result of their large numbers and their life in China.Also note that Ricci is fully aware of the Muslims' apparent success in being accepted by the surrounding Chinese society.As he puts it, they are treated as "native" by the Chinese even though they preserve their Muslim identity.According to Ricci, the Chinese attitude toward the Muslims is the result of several factors: the Chinese take them to be inferior, and this makes the Muslims seem unthreatening and keeps them relatively isolated.

Al
Furthermore, unlike the Muslims who "ignite" fires of hatred and agitate the Chinese against the Europeans in the earlier report, the Muslims now do not "cause trouble" and do not provoke or inflame their non-Muslim Chinese neighbors in any way.We also learn that they also obey Chinese laws and, above all, are not "suspected of plotting rebe- 44 "Aquesto male se ne aggiunse un altro, e fu che, con la vicinanza della Persia, per la parte di ponente, entorno in questo regno in varij tempi molti della legge macomettana, e si moltipolicorno tanto per generatione ne' suo figliuoli e nipoti, che già hanno impita tutta la Cina con molte migliaia di famiglie; et quasi in tutte le provincie con molto sumputose meschite, dove recitano, si circoncidono, e fanno le loro cerimonie.Ma per quello che no saputo, loro, nè seminano, nè procurano, di divulgare la sua legge, anzi vivono assai soggetti alle leggi della Cina et in grande ignorantia della loro setta, e sono tentui in puoco conto da' Cinesi.Con tutto ciò, per esser già tutti naturali, non suspettano di loro reibellione, e già li lasciano studiare et entrare ne' gradi et magistrati del regno; e molti di loro, riceuto il grado, lasciano anco la loro antica setta, non gli restando altro di essa che il non mangiare carne di porco per non esser avvezzi a essa".Ricci, Della Etrata, p. 91.Most of this passage is cited in Spence, The Memory Palace, p. 118.Translation is Spence's with some of my editions and amendments.llion."In fact, Ricci takes care to tell us that they are not proselytizing in way, passively or aggressively, directly or indirectly.course stands in sharp contrast to ways and methods employed by the Jesuits and other missionaries active in China at the time, who do proselytize.The Muslims also seem to be uninterested in non-Muslim, or "general," Chinese customs and beliefs.This, again, is quite the opposite of the tediously "anthropological" attitude of the Jesuits toward Chinese religions and philosophies, for which Ricci himself is chiefly responsible.In short, whereas the Jesuits are very interested in the nature of Chinese rites and beliefs, the Chinese Muslims are not.
But the biggest change in Ricci's perception of the Muslims is revealed in the terminology he uses.In the first passages reviewed above, Ricci speaks of the Muslims in ethnic terms-calling them "Muhammadan Saracens" (saraceni macometani) and paying no attention to their religious beliefs and rites.In this passage the ethnic term "Saracen" disappears altogether, and instead of the generic "Muhammadan," Ricci uses a much more religious term: "followers of Mohammedan law" (della legge macomettana).This differentiation between Muslim and Saracen is not entirely new in the Italian perception-as opposed to that of other contemporary European cultures-of Islam and Muslims.It might be the case that Ricci reflects this Italian perception as well.In contrast, Allaire has identified changes in the perceptions of the "noble Saracen" and the "Muslim enemy." 45But here, in an interesting way, the contrast seems to be between "noble Muslims" and "Saracen enemies."Ricci now speaks about the Muslims in different terms.In his early passages he saw, and conveyed, the Muslimness of the people he had met in Canton in ethnic terms.The mere fact that these people were Muslims was enough to ethnicize-or, better, to Saracenize-them, even though they had nothing to do with the Saracens Ricci had known back home.In the later passage, the term "Saracen" disappears, and Ricci speaks clearly about the Muslims in religious terms.He does not classify Islam as a religion per se.But he does refer to the Muslims, quite correctly, as "followers of Muhammadan law" and describes in detail their liturgical customs and rites.In this context, we can mention again the issue of proselytization highlighted above.
The fact that Ricci addresses the issue in his later report clearly indicates that he now perceives the Muslims first of as a religious community.When about Muslims who climbed up the ranks the Chinese bureaucracy, something that means adhering to Confucian norms and values, he describes this transformation as "deserting their own old sect [beliefs]" (lasciano anco la loro antica setta).It is interesting to note that in this context of cultural change, the desertion of Islamic low, pork remains the final frontier for Muslims.Those sophisticated Confucian Muslims pass as normal Chinese until the moment when pork is served and they refrain from touching it.Eating pork is a practice to which "they have never become accustomed."I shall return to this point below.Finally, even the "evil" that Ricci assigns to the Muslims is different in nature.In the early passage, the Saracen Muslims represent a political evil, inciting hatred of the Portuguese.In the later passage, the Muslims are still "evil," but this evil thing is attached to the idolatrous religious practices of the Chinese.
Semedo's report is similar to that of Ricci but provides a much longer and more detailed account of the Muslims.The major difference is the tone.Semedo's account is devoid of the negative tone that still lurks behind Ricci's thoughts about Muslims.Semedo describes in detail, taking almost three long pages, Chinese Muslims' observance of dietary and marriage laws and their intermarriage with the Chinese.Semedo also discusses the question of eating pork, but without too much drama: the Muslims he says, prefer to live in areas where people eat beef, as opposed to pork (son lo por la mayor parte adonde están las carnicerías de la baca; que como no comen Puerco).

Hebrew Muslims: The Possibility and Limitations of Cultural Change
The final item in Ricci's narrative-the one about high-ranking, and highly assimilated, Chinese Muslim officials who do not eat porktells us precisely how much Ricci came to know about Chinese Islam in the course of twenty years.Again, it is remarkable to note that in spite of the numerous references to Muslims in Ricci's writings, he does not mention even a single conversation he had with a Muslim.Yet he seems to know so much about them that he is even able to discuss their intimate behaviors.To wit, Ricci describes the high-ranking Mus-  Al-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015lims as people who hide their Muslim origins or Islamic beliefs until it comes to "eating pork, to which they have never become can imagine such a scene: a Chinese Muslim official at court among his Confucian academicians, "passing" completely as anyone else until pork is served, when he is "outed" as a Muslim.Ricci, who never attended the Chinese court or personally knew high-ranking officials, could not have witnessed this.He probably heard about such scenes from non-Muslim officials who had witnessed them at court.Probably these officials are also the ones who had told Ricci all he knew about Muslims, including this intimate detail about the few high-ranking Muslim officials.
The story about the Muslims who pass as typical members of the Chinese elite until pork is served brings back most pointedly the question of cultural change.It is an extreme situation depicting the condition of almost complete assimilation, leaving a single element that ties an elite man to his previous life as someone else or to his culturally different roots.The fact that Ricci included this story in his account of the Chinese Muslims shows that he was curious about the habits and lives of such Muslims and inquired about issues centered on cultural or religious adaptation and accommodation.It is also clear that he framed the story as a tale about cultural adaptation-pointing out that eating pork is something that that Muslims "have never become accustomed."Conversely, Semedo merely reports that Muslims do not eat pork and prefer living in areas where beef is the main meat.Semedo's rather neutral tone when he reports this and the fact that he does attach the issue of pork to questions of becoming accustomed only accentuate, I would suggest, Ricci's sensitivities about cultural change.He was concerned with what such situations meant for him, for future Jesuit missionaries, and more importantly for the future Chinese Christians he expected to see in China in the wake of his activities.Accommodation and the relationship between Chinese culture and Christianity were very much on his mind.To put it crassly, accommodation was the outcome of asking if one can simultaneously be Confucian (read: Chinese) and Christian.The big question that concerned everyone involved in the project of Christianizing China was to what extent Chinese converts would be allowed to remain Chinese after becoming Christian.In other words, does conversion entail, or mandate, cultural change?The other side of the coin, the question of the possibility of becoming Chinese, 522 ZVI BEN-DOR BENITE Al-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015was clearly on the minds of Jesuits like Ricci, who studied Chinese and tried hard to engage with the Chinese on their own terms. 46ultural change, and the cultural change, were therefore key issues the Jesuits, and the Muslims of China have been a great source of historical and social experience for Ricci to study.But he never engages them directly, which naturally raises the question of why he behaved in that way.Ricci inquires about Muslims but never speaks to them.One incident is striking.In 1607, Ricci hears that the second edition of his Catechismo-Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven)-"is bought by, among others, many from the sect of the Saracens, for it seems to be consistent with their doctrines."Ricci simply notes this fact in his diary and does not ponder the possible meaning of it, nor does he consider the possibility of initiating a conversation with a Muslim.He simply reports that "someone has told me that the many of the Moorish faith, who live in this country, buy this book, for it seems to them that it speaks of God better than the books of China." 47One can detect here, again, the duality between the ethnic sounding "Saracens" and the religious sounding "many of the Moorish faith," with which Ricci seems to have been struggling when he was thinking of Muslims in China.But more important, it is astonishing to realize that the Jesuit scholar who spent his whole life seeking common ground with Confucians in China through dialogue did not seek to do the same thing with Muslims, even when the possibility of a theological common ground with the Muslims of China presented itself.
This lack of interest in dialoguing with Muslims stands in sharp contrast to Ricci's interest in Jews in China-particularly in the context of cultural change.It should be recalled that Ricci did make efforts to converse with and interrogate the Jew Ai.Ricci asked him how much he knew of his own religion, asked him questions about scripture, and even showed him portraits of Christian biblical figures.Evidently, he thought he had much in common with the Chinese Jew and much to ask him.This makes a great deal of sense if we recall the long history of Jewish-Christian polemics and other exchanges in Europe.The tory of these exchanges actually gains during the early modern period in Italy This was a time when both the of print culture and the Catholic reformation gave rise to a heightened Christian interest in Jewish thought and religion that in turn produced phenomena such as Christian Hebraism on the one hand, and tight control and censoring of Hebrew texts on the other hand. 48In other words, Ricci probably imagined that he had some common ground with Jews when he approached the Jew Ai.Furthermore, as an educated early modern Italian humanist, Ricci had the tool kit with which to engage the Jew. 49oncerning Islam and Muslims, things were still different at that point: Ricci lacked the tool kit with which he could engage Muslims in China-or anywhere else, for that matter-and struggled to make sense of their presence in China and what it might imply for Christianity.In this regard, the comparison with the case of the Jew Ai exposes one clear limitation Ricci had when it came to thinking about the role of religion in the process of cultural change.
Semedo's report accentuates the issue of the missing Islamic tool in Ricci's cultural tool kit.In contrast to Ricci's, Semedo's attitude toward Muslims seems to be more relaxed.He does report a conversation he had with a Muslim: "they [the Muslims] know many things from the sacred scripture.In Nanjing, I found one born and raised there who told me: 'David, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.'"Excitedly, Semedo also reports that the Muslim pronounced the four names "the way I [Semedo]  pronounce them." 50This anecdote actually exposes the Jesuits' lack of knowledge about Islam, since the four aforementioned biblical figures occupy a special place in Islam and are mentioned many times in the Qur'an, not only in Christian scriptures.But Semedo could understand acquaintance with these names only as knowledge of the Bible.It is also evident from the conversation that when he conversed with the

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LIKE THE HEBREWS IN SPAIN": THE JESUIT ENCOUNTER WITH MUSLIMS IN CHINAAl-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015 Bearing this crucial point in mind, 507 "LIKE THE HEBREWS IN SPAIN": THE JESUIT ENCOUNTER WITH MUSLIMS IN CHINA At court they found, among other Muslims, the descen-512 ZVI BEN-DOR BENITEAl-Qantara XXXVI 2, 2015, pp.503-529 ISSN 0211-3589 doi: 10.3989/alqantara.2015.015 28Pingyi, "Scientific Dispute in the Imperial Court: The 1664 Calendar Case,". 29This admiration with Confucianism eventually got the Jesuits into a lot of trouble the Pope and the many enemies they had in Rome.See for example Rule, K'ung-Tzu or Confucius: The Jesuit Interpretation of Confucianism.See also Gernet, China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures, trans.Janet Lloyd; and Spence, The Memory Palace. 30For the Confucian-Christian dialogues in China, see Xiaochao, Christianity and Imperial Culture: Chinese Christian Apologetics in the Seventeenth Century and their Latin Patristic Equivalent. 31For a recent interpretation of the Jesuit efforts, see Zhang, "Cultural Accommodation or Intellectual Colonization?A Reinterpretation of the Jesuit Approach to Confucianism during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," Ph.D. diss, Harvard University, 1996.

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"LIKE THE HEBREWS IN SPAIN": THE JESUIT ENCOUNTER WITH MUSLIMS IN CHINA