Read on Twitter
The Gulistan (Rose Garden) by the thirteenth-century poet Saʿdi is among the most beloved and widely-read works in the canon of #Persian literature. Did you know it was also an important text for #Islam in China? A thread 1/ https://twitter.com/IJIArticles/status/1341824122930700288
The Gulistan is a beautiful prosimetric (prose+verse) work, full of didactic anecdotes and witty verses. Historically it was a core text of #Persianate education; pictured here is an Ottoman Turkish commentary from Bosnia. For more on the Gulistan see https://iranicaonline.org/articles/golestan-e-sadi 2/
The Gulistan was read throughout the Persianate world, from the Balkans to Bengal & beyond—as far as eastern China. Persian was historically a core part of Islamic education in China & the main written language of most Chinese Muslim communities until around the 17th century. 3/
Persian education started to weaken in China in the 1930s under the pressures of nationalism and Islamic modernism. Wang Jingzhai first translated the Gulistan into Chinese in 1947. He was a #Hui Muslim scholar who also translated the Qur'an. 4/
The Gulistan was translated again in 1958 by Jianfu Shui, who relied on English translation of the text. The most impactful translation, however, was by Yang Wanbao in 2000. Yang is an imam of the Jahriyya Sufi order and a leader in his local Islamic Association of China. 5/
Yang's translation transforms the Gulistan from Persian belles-lettres into a pietistic work of modern, national Chinese Islam. For example, the original text is rife with homoerotic references (typical of Persian lit) which are made heteroerotic in the translation. 6/
This is in line with the Chinese state's disapproval of same-sex relations as well as the Islamic Association of China's modernist approach to Islam and the Jahriyya Sufi order's strict adherence to the shariʿah, all of which come together in Yang's translation of the Gulistan 7/
Yang's translation also makes interesting use of Confucian and Buddhist-inflected images & idioms to translate Sufi concepts. It's the culmination of a sadly brief period of openness for Muslims (especially Hui) prior to the more recent 'war on terror' rhetoric & crackdown. 8/
For more on Persian in China and role of the Gulistan in Chinese Islam, see «Sinicizing Islam: Translating the Gulistan of Saʿdi in Modern China» by Alexander Jabbari & Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai https://brill.com/view/journals/ijia/1/1/article-p6_2.xml. Thanks for reading! /end