Date

January 22,2011

4:00 pm Reception

(Refreshments will be provided)

4:30 pm Lecture

5:15 pm Q&A

Please RSVP (lectures@pacificasv.org) as soon as possible since the spacing for the event is quite limited.

Title

Islamic Accommodation of Confucianism in Early Modern China: The Han Kitab Scholar Liu Zhi (ca. 1660-1739) and His Metaphysics of Islam (tianfang xingli)

Speaker Biography

Prof. Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of HistoryUniversity of California, Santa Cruz and his research focuses on the intellectual history of early modern China.   He was a Andrew Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at University of Chicago from 2003- 2005. He earned his PhD in History from UCLA with the dissertation title: Cosmopolitan Confucians: China’s road to Modern Science.He is currently completing his book manuscript Cosmopolitan Confucians: The Pathway to Modern Chinese Thought.

Abstract:

Most Islamic texts rendered in Classical Chinese from 1500 to 1800 came from Sufi texts in Arabic. Many Muslim scholars in China had long contended that their Sufi doctrines were not only compatible with the imperial orthodoxy, defined by Confucian canon, but also revealed Confucianism as one of many paths to the universal truth.  The missionaries from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), who arrived at China after 1600, followed their opponent’s (Muslim) tactic by claiming that Catholicism was also compatible with Confucianism. In this talk, I will describe the parallel of Muslim and Catholic ways in attempting to demonstrate their compatibility with imperial orthodoxy and show how the imperial court of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) managed to tolerate the coexistence of Catholicism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism, Chan Buddhism as subsets of Confucian canon.