Content area
Full Text
Sachico Murata, William Chittick and Tu Weiming. The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms, with a foreword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 678. ISBN 10: 0674033256. Price: $ 49.95, Hardbound.
Author of one of the best and most popular introductory English textbooks to Islam written in the past two decades, The Vision of Islam, Professor Murata is an expert of Islam and the Sino-Japanese intellectual tradition especially the contribution Chinese Muslim confucianist writers called Huiru. Her interest in studying the family law of Islam took her to Iran where she "began serious study of the sapiential tradition in addition to Juridical tradition" and attended Professor Toshihiko Izutsu's classes on the Fu??? al-?ikam of Ibn 'Arab?. As she tells us in the introduction to her book The Tao of Islam, "from her earliest contacts with the manifestations of classical Islamic Civilization she felt it held some deep kinship with her own Far-Eastern background" (Tao of Islam, 6). In the early eighties when asked to teach a course on Feminine spirituality in world religions, she approached the principles of gender relationship in Islam with the help of conceptual apparatus drawn from traditional Chinese cosmology. Successful teaching of that course resulted in the form of her book The Tao of Islam. At the end of her introduction, Professor Murata acknowledges that it was Professor Izutsu who gave her the key to understand Islamic cosmogenesis in terms of the I Ching. After six years she published a translation of the work of T'ang dynasty Chinese Muslim writer Wang Tai Yu, published as Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai Yu's "Great Learning of Pure and Real (Albany: State University of New York, 2000). This work included a translation of a latter Chinese Muslim author Liu Zhi's translation of J?m?'s Law?'i?, Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm. In her introduction to this work, Murata makes the following important remarks:
It became clear to me in carrying out the research for the book that the manner in which Islamic intellectuality is portrayed by modern scholarship has at least as much to do with the preconceptions of Western scholars as with the actual texts. If scholars see the...