Between ‘Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals’ and Jesuit Eurasian networks

Closing his survey of common madrasa curricula across the three early modern Muslim-ruled empires, Robinson concluded that ‘a world of much shared knowledge has been revealed… This shared knowledge, moreover, was constantly renewed in most, although not all, of the region by the travels of scholars and mystics and the connections of teachers and pupils, masters and disciples.’Footnote ³ Yet, as Robinson was undoubtedly aware, the same period saw the arrival of Catholic missionaries—Capuchin and Augustin as well as Jesuit—in each of the empires he scrutinised. Selected for their erudition as much as their zeal, these missionaries studied Persian and Arabic so as to break into—and challenge—the ‘system’ of learning that upheld the Islamic knowledge promoted by the ulama and Sufis on whom Robinson focused. The outcome was a small corpus of Catholic Christian texts in Arabic and Persian—scripture translations, hagiographies, polemics—produced in a bid to use the linguistic basis of that ‘connective system’ to undermine its Muslim foundations.

Over the past decade or so, these texts—and the locals who either contributed or responded to them—have become the focus of increasing interest.Footnote ⁴ Consequently, we have a better understanding of the concerns, collaborations, and constraints that shaped such Persian works as the Mir’āt al-Quds (‘Mirror of Holiness’) and Dāstān-i Masīh (‘Story of the Messiah’), produced around the Mughal court through the joint efforts of the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo Xavier (1549–1617) and the court litterateur ‘Abd al-Sattar Lahawri (fl. 1610–1620).Footnote ⁵ A generation later in Safavid Persia, Aimé Chézaud (1604–1664)—Xavier's French fellow Jesuit—built on the Persian output of his predecessor via a series of original compositions and revisions.Footnote ⁶ We also have occasional glimpses of parallel translations from Latin into Persian taking place under Muslim rather than Christian sponsorship. One example is Samarat al-Falāsifa (‘Fruits of the Philosophers’), an account of Greek and Roman philosophers compiled at the request of the emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) by the aforementioned ‘Abd al-Sattar, who had learned his Latin from Xavier.Footnote ⁷ Still, imported Latin books did not always find interpreters at the Mughal court. When the British emissary Sir Thomas Roe presented Jodocus Hondius's 1613 Latin printed edition of Mercator's atlas to Akbar's successor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), the emperor returned it to Roe two weeks later. For Jahangir ‘had shewed it to his Mulaies [mullahs] and no man could read nor understand it’.Footnote ⁸ This was perhaps all the more unfortunate insofar as the atlas also included a remarkably detailed map of China.Footnote ⁹

In the Ottoman empire, Latin occasionally formed part of the linguistic toolkit of professional imperial interpreters, since Ottoman control of the Morea and Rumelia afforded a more linguistically diverse—or, at least, more European—recruitment base. One such figure was Yunus Bey (d. 1551), a Greek convert to Islam who rose to the rank of chief dragoman (baş tercüman).Footnote ¹⁰ Participating in the conquest of Hungary, Yunus Bey happened upon several Latin works (most likely an epitome of Pompeius Trogus's Historiae Philippicae and Thuróczy János's Chronica Hungarorum) that he selectively translated, and adapted, to produce the Tarih-i Ungurus (‘History of Hungary’). Despite this title, the opening third of the text dwelt on the conquests of Alexander the Great, which Yunus then wove into his account of Hungary's medieval rulers, thus linking the new Ottoman territory to the sultans who saw themselves as the heirs of ‘Iskender’.Footnote ¹¹ Here was the tercüman as creative cultural interpreter more than passive plain translator.

Another Ottoman linguistic go-between was the Greek Alexander Mavrocordato (1641–1709), who studied medicine via Latin in Padua before being appointed chief dragoman in 1673. But perhaps the closest counterpart to Ricci's Persian translator to emerge from the Ottoman empire was Pedros Bedik, an Armenian born near Aleppo in 1643, who at the age of 16 was sent to study in Rome, where he became a Catholic. After extensive travels in the Safavid realms (whither he later returned as a diplomat), in 1678 he published in Vienna a Latin description of Persia, which included a printed introduction in Persian.Footnote ¹² But Bedik, like Yunus Bey and other Ottoman dragomans, was born around the Mediterranean, where Latin remained an important language of learning, not least through the Catholic outreach to Greek and Armenian Christians that saw the founding in Rome of the Pontificio Collegio Greco in 1577 followed in 1627 by the Pontificio Collegio Urbano (where Bedik himself studied). But further east of the Mediterranean, such Latin skills remained extremely rare: what Robinson called the ‘connective systems’ of the Safavids and Mughals were, after all, based on Arabic and Persian. Thus, when the Safavid ruler Shah Sultan Husayn (r. 1694–1722) commissioned his foremost scholar, Sayyid Mir Muhammad Baqir Khatunabadi (d.1715), to make a Persian translation of the Gospels to replace those disseminated by the missionaries, for want of knowing Latin, Khatunabadi had to work from the Arabic Vulgate issued in Rome by the Medici Oriental Press rather than the Latin Vulgate on which the Arabic version was based.Footnote ¹³

Nonetheless, as recent scholarship has shown, the same period also saw the strengthening of diplomatic and commercial ties between Catholic (especially Habsburg) Europe and the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal realms.Footnote ¹⁴ Here too there was a bibliographical harvest as emissaries sent to or from Europe produced a series of travelogues, geographies, and histories.Footnote ¹⁵ While these works were generally more informational than polemical, they nonetheless frequently emerged from the intellectual nexus of the Catholic missions, for their authors were often converts, whether from Armenian Orthodoxy or Shi‘i Islam. One such figure was Uruch Beg (1560–1604; better known as ‘Don Juan de Persia’), who converted in Rome during an embassy sent by Shah Abbas (r. 1588–1629). After settling in Habsburg Spain, he penned his Relaciones, detailing the history, geography, and ethnography of the Safavid dominions, along with other ‘cosas notables de Persia’.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1604, his Castilian text was published in Valladolid, addressed to King Felipe III (r. 1598–1621). A century later, the Armenian Catholic convert Elia of Erzerum (1689–1750?) made similar use of his language skills—in Armenian, French, Persian, Turkish, and Armeno-Turkish—to work as an intermediary between the Safavids and Habsburgs, as well as the British, French, and Dutch East India companies.Footnote ¹⁷

As we will see, all of these figures held much in common with Ricci's Persian translator. For to the east of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal domains lay that other early modern empire—the Ming—that Catholic missionary networks had similarly linked to Europe, producing a set of translations between Chinese and Latin that paralleled those between Arabic, Persian, and Latin.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet these were indeed parallel rather than intersecting lines—or ‘networks’—of intellectual transmission: between Latin and Arabic, or between Latin and Chinese; but not, say, between Latin, Arabic, and Chinese. But in one case at least, the disjunctures of geography, personnel, and language that separated this Eurasian informational traffic were overcome. The person who achieved this was in many respects a classic middleman, like the figures mentioned above: he was a Muslim convert to Christianity, who added Latin to his mastery of Persian; he travelled from Safavid Persia to Rome, then Mughal India; and by combining these linguistic skills with social access to Jesuit circles, he made a Persian translation of the most important text to emerge from the Jesuit missions to China.Footnote ¹⁹

He also had an appropriately cosmopolitan clutch of names: he was Muhammad Zaman; also known as Paolo Zaman and Farangi Khan (‘the Frankish Khan’) and sometimes Farangi Khwan (‘Reader of Frankish’).Footnote ²⁰ The book he translated was De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu (‘On the Christian Mission among the Chinese by the Society of Jesus’) by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610).Footnote ²¹

Muhammad ‘Paolo’ Zaman and his book on China

The little we currently know about Ricci's translator Muhammad Zaman comes from Niccolao Manucci (1638–1717), that Italian counterpart at the Mughal court.Footnote ²² According to Manucci—who met ‘Muhamedzama’ in person—Zaman was raised in Persia (placing him in the period when Catholic missionaries were making their presence known in the Safavid capital at Isfahan). In view of Zaman's great intelligence, he was sent to Rome by Shah Abbas with the goal that he should acquire sufficient understanding of the Christian faith, and its languages of learning, to refute the Jesuit missionaries (whom we have seen learning to debate, and write, in Arabic and Persian, of course with local help). As far as Manucci could gather, Zaman had been dispatched to Rome by Shah Abbas ‘early in his reign’.Footnote ²³ While this apparently points to the 1590s, as Manucci's own translator, William Irvine, noted over a century ago, the timing of the meeting with ‘Muhamedzama’ (seemingly around the time of Awrangzeb's ascent in the late 1650s) would suggest that the journey to Rome instead took place early in the reign of Shah Abbas II, pointing to the 1640s instead. This would have coincided with the heightened Safavid response to the missionaries through the efforts of Sayyid Ahmad Alavi early in that decade.Footnote ²⁴

Be that as it may, according to Manucci, contrary to the intentions of his courtly sponsors, Zaman came to love the religion he studied and so converted to Christianity, assuming the name ‘Paolo’ in lieu of ‘Muhammad’. However, after returning home to Persia, he became fearful of being executed as an apostate (several Muslim converts had already been executed by the Safavid authorities).Footnote ²⁵ Consequently, Manucci continued, Zaman followed the (by-then well-trodden) path from Isfahan to Delhi, seeking refuge at the court of Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658). Being well received, he was granted the rank of mansabdār (placing him among the many other Īrānīs given similar positions in the Mughal hierarchy).Footnote ²⁶ And so, Manucci concluded, Zaman settled in Delhi, where he made friends with various European Christians, particularly a ‘Father Buzeo (Busée)’, with whom he discussed theological questions and by whom, most tantalising of all, he was shown ‘several Latin books’.Footnote ²⁷

From this point, we can draw on Zaman's own testimony, which he inserted as a preface to his translation of Ricci.

What is immediately striking about Zaman's account—at least as it appeared in the form translated above from the first printed version of 1864—are its glaring problems. For he referred to the text's original author not as Matteo Ricci, or some rendering thereof, but as ‘Pādrī Īksūs’; and to his Delhi-based intermediary not as Manucci's ‘Buzeo’, but as ‘Pādrī Būrnū’. The latter problem is the easiest for which to pose a solution by way of a scribal error: a simple misreading of underdots and overdots in the manuscript used by the copyist could transform ﺒﻮﺰﻴﻮ (Būziyū) into the ﺒﻮﺭﻨﻮ (Būrnū) of the imprint cited, thus reconciling Manucci's testimony with that of Zaman himself. As for the origins of the mysterious ‘Pādrī Īksūs’, here too the likeliest solution seems to be a scribal orthographic slip over an unfamiliar name. Thus, Lu Jin's critical edition of the text proposes a scribal misreading of ﺭ as ﺍﻳ and therefore replaces the original ‘Īksūs’ with ‘Rīksūs’.Footnote ²⁹ This takes us a step closer to the Latin version of Ricci's name as ‘Riccius’: two lost dots under the ﺲ of ‘Rīksūs’ would finally return us to ‘Rīkiyūs’. Be that as it may, these reconstructions are all long after the fact, for when the text reached the new public of print in the mid-nineteenth century the repeated use of ‘Īksūs’ instead of ‘Ricci’ would conceal its true origins.

However, Zaman's testimony does allow us to reconstruct the broad contours of the transmission of Ricci's writings from his death in 1610—when his original notebooks, written in Italian dialect, were left in the Ming capital of Beijing—to Zaman's encounter with what was apparently a ‘published’ (mushtahar) version in the erstwhile Mughal capital of Delhi.Footnote ³⁰ In the interim, Ricci's notebooks had been recovered by the Dutch Jesuit Nicolas Trigault (1577–1628), who edited them, translated them into Latin, and in 1615 published them in Augsburg under the title De Christiana expeditione. Although various digests and translations into the European vernaculars soon followed, the regular appearance of loanword Latinisms in Zaman's Persian translation makes it clear that it was the Latin version which he accessed in Delhi.

As to when this happened, Zaman's mention of Father Buzeo helps us establish a time range. For as Vladimir Ivanow established almost a century ago in his catalogue of Persian manuscripts of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Buzeo was the Flemish Jesuit Hendrik Busi, born in Nijmegen in 1618 with the name Hendrick Uwens. Since Buzeo arrived in Agra in 1648, where he became associated with Dara Shikuh, and died in Delhi in 1667, Zaman probably encountered him—and thence Ricci's book—at some point during this 20-year period.Footnote ³¹ As to why Buzeo carried a copy of Ricci's book to Delhi, the answer seems to lie with Buzeo's original plan and ambition to follow his celebrated Jesuit forebears to China, with India only serving as a staging or training post along the way.Footnote ³² Since as early as 1647 Buzeo reported that he ‘knew the Persian language quite nicely (sabe já bellamente a lingoa Persia)’, credence may also be granted to Zaman's mention that Buzeo not only supplied the book, but also ‘helped me’ to translate it.Footnote ³³ In short, Ricci's writings were taken from China to Europe, and then back east to India, in the process moving from Italian to Latin to Persian. Here, then, was a two-fold translatio in the dual senses of an act of linguistic translation and the transfer of something from one place to another.

Nonetheless, Zaman did not translate the entirety of De Christiana expeditione. Instead, through what Francesco Calzolaio and Stefano Pellò have aptly termed ‘a dual process of abridgement and delocalization’, Zaman made a series of cuts that removed the lengthy chapters detailing the Jesuit mission to China, as well as the many comparisons Ricci made with conditions in Europe.Footnote ³⁴ Consequently, Zaman edited Ricci's text down into a much shorter work—the ten chapters he mentioned in his preface—that focused solely on China in and of itself. One might be tempted to call it a text about China ‘in its own terms’. But there of course lay the rub: whose terms should, or could, Zaman deploy in translating a book about a culture for which there were no precise labels in either Latin or Persian?

The challenges of Translatio

As we will now see by turning to sample sections of the Persian text in relation to its Latin source, Zaman's strategy of abridgement and delocalisation was not without its problems. Merely removing explicit mentions of Europe and its Christian missions could not exorcise the Jesuit spirit that infused the text as an interpretive whole. For De Christiana expeditione was not simply a Christian view of China, but a highly intellectualised Jesuit perception formed through the eyes and ideas, books and terms of the Confucian court scholars who, in comprising Ricci's own intermediaries, shaped his account of China's culture at large. As for Zaman's decision to stay ‘true’ to the Latin original, this sometimes saw him adopt Latin loanwords that were surely meaningless to readers of Persian, all the more so because some were Trigault's Latinisations of loanwords Ricci had based on vocalised Chinese characters for which he lacked equivalent terms in his Venetian dialect of Italian which Trigault had then rendered into Latin.

Even when Zaman decided against directly borrowing Latin terms from Ricci/Trigault, he faced the more general challenge of having to find Persian conceptual equivalents for Chinese practices, institutions, and doctrines. That is, for unfamiliar (and also, for Zaman, unwitnessed) customs that reached him via a European linguistic-cum-conceptual filter, which in the case of Ricci's book also involved prior stages of filtering from Mandarin into Italian then Latin.

Consequently, Ricci supplied Zaman—and his Persianate readership—with a detailed yet invisibly distorted picture of China's geography, economy, customs, and government, as well as of its systems of learning, and of what were—whether among European Christians or ‘Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals’—China's effectively unknown religions. Rendering Ricci into Persian in the mid-seventeenth century therefore presented Zaman with an enormous, and twofold, interpretive challenge. This was not merely because he was translating a complex text from Latin. It was also because he was translating an account of a region with which he was not personally familiar and of a cultural system for which there were precious few previous accounts in Persian.Footnote ³⁵ In the early modern Persian manuscript ecumene, even such prior accounts as did exist—such as the third volume of the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh from the Mongol period—were not necessarily available to the likes of Zaman in Delhi, centuries after they were written.Footnote ³⁶

This absence of accessible forerunners added further to the difficulties of ensuring the continuity and accuracy of cross-cultural comprehension. It meant that Zaman had little available to him by way of a Sinological vocabulary in Persian, forcing him to rely on broad Islamicate terms to describe a very different cultural system that lay outside the Islamicate and Persianate ‘connected systems’ of the Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans. Consequently, Zaman had to render Ricci's awkwardly combined Christian-Confucian presentation of Chinese religions in Persianate and Islamicate conceptual terms that were his best available equivalents for the ‘Christianate’ Latin terminology, which Trigault in turn had previously selected to render Ricci's Italian approximations of ‘Confucianate’ depictions of Chinese Buddhism and Daoism as well as Confucianism itself. As counterparts to the established concept of ‘Islamicate’, here I propose the terms ‘Christianate’ and ‘Confucianate’ to refer to engagements with—in this case depictions of—non-Christian and non-Confucian religions or cultures that are nonetheless articulated in Christian and Confucian terms, whether by way of language, concepts, or textual genres.

We can now turn to an illustrative sample of these problems through a comparative analysis of relevant sections of the Persian and Latin texts. Aside from deleting Ricci's discussions of Jesuit activities and comparisons with Europe, Zaman's text followed the sequence, topics, and details of his Latin source text closely.Footnote ³⁷ In expanding length, his ten chapters covered the name of China and its meaning; physical geography; agricultural produce; mechanical industries; branches of learning; mode of government; civil customs and ceremonies; the physical appearance of people and cities; fortune-telling rituals; and the doctrinal precepts of its main religions.

Translating the earlier chapters on geography, agrarian produce, and silk and cotton industries were relatively straightforward, insofar as they described flora, domesticated mammals, and trade commodities that had been shared across Eurasia for millennia. Fortunately, there was a focus on crops, animals, and trade goods (such as rice, goats, and cotton) for which there were clear terms in Latin (and Persian), rather than the much more varied items that surely appeared in China's markets and dining tables. But even when a commodity was not yet known and hence named, circumlocutive explanation was possible, such that tea (chā’ī)—in Ricci and Zaman's time as unfamiliar in Europe as in India and Persia—was described as a herb that was harvested in spring, dried out, then ‘drunk like coffee’.Footnote ³⁸

However, when Zaman moved on to Ricci's account of religions—a topic that was, after all, at the core of Jesuit interests—he faced considerably more complex translational problems than finding equivalent terms for China's physical landscape, and for the agricultural commodities and craft goods it yielded. We will see how some of these problems played out by turning to Zaman's Persian rendition of Ricci's depiction of China's systems of learning and religions.

The religions of Chīn between Latin and Persian

Notwithstanding their shared commitment to Christianity, Ricci and Zaman both came from and wrote for quite different cultural environments. Moreover, their ‘connected’ attempt to describe China's wholly unfamiliar religious systems tested the terminological capacity of both early modern Latin and Persian, with results that obfuscated as much as explained. Consequently, Zaman's Persian translation altered the meaning of its already problematic Latin source in subtle but significant ways.

The chapter on popular divination practices provides an entry point to these semantic divergences between Latin and Persian (and between Italian and Chinese in the invisible background). The transmission of basic empirical observations from Latin to Persian was broadly accurate, explaining the widespread Chinese recourse to fortune-telling, such that printed almanacs detailed the best or worst dates to perform any number of activities, from seeing one's parents to building a house to making a journey.Footnote ³⁹ However, the valence of such practices varied considerably between the text's Latin and Persian readerships. As a Catholic writing amid the Counter-Reformation, Ricci described divination in the plainly negative terms of ‘superstitioni’ and ‘errori’. In Zaman's milieus of Mughal India and Safavid Persia, by contrast, learned divination was much more acceptable, particularly in the court circles between which he moved. Thus, in a subtle semantic difference that shifted the valence of these activities, Zaman termed these Chinese practices as ‘fālgū’ī’, implicitly alluding to sophisticated Persian divinatory texts that used verses of Hafiz, and as ‘ta‘bīr-i khwāb’ (dream interpretation), which was an even more respectable branch of the Islamic sciences studied by Muslim clerics as well as courtiers.Footnote ⁴⁰

Yet Zaman's subtle approbation was not carried into his rendering of the next chapter on the religions (mazāhib) of China. While Ricci was himself broadly critical of these religions (if, as we will see, more positively disposed towards Confucianism), Zaman went a step further by framing them from the outset in terms of the older Islamicate category of ‘idol worship’ (but-parastī). He interposed this concept into his translation of the chapter's opening sentence, which had no equivalent term in the Latin original.Footnote ⁴¹

Zaman's version of the chapter's opening paragraph is worth quoting in full to see how Ricci's ‘Christianate’ picture of Chinese religiosity was reframed in Islamicate terms:

At both the end and beginning of this framing paragraph, Zaman had inserted the term ‘but-parastī’ (idol worship) with which China (and indeed India) had been associated in Persian texts since the early medieval period, not least through the Central Asian Buddhist practices that found etymological echo in the Persian term ‘but’. This was a culturally specific—and tangible—concept that differed from the condemnatory term Ricci used at the end of the paragraph, which was ‘atheismum’ (‘atheism’). By contrast, Zaman's but-parastī was closer to the Latin term ‘idolatria’: unlike the abstract concept of atheism, idol worship was a visible transgression; it was more heteropraxy than heterodoxy. Although Zaman chose not to substitute Ricci's comparisons to Europe with contrasts to India, for readers in India at least, ‘idol worship’ would have been easy to imagine, not least since but-parastī had often been used in Persian texts to refer to Hindu forms of worship.

After this framing introduction, Ricci and Zaman examined the ‘three religions’ of China in more detail. The first—what we would now call Confucianism—Zaman labelled the ‘mazhab-i hukumā’ (‘religion of the sages’ or more prosaically ‘religion of the learned’) in lieu of Ricci's ‘litteratorum’ (‘scholars’). Ricci's study of Confucian teachings had cultivated the positive appreciation that led him to write his celebrated Chinese text of composite Christian-Confucian theology, Tianzhu Shiyi (‘The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven’).Footnote ⁴³ This intellectualised Jesuit approval of Confucianism was passed into Zaman's Persian, lending the ‘religion of the sages’ an implicit endorsement among his presumed target audience of learned Muslims and Persian-reading Hindus associated with the Mughal court and bureaucracy.

Zaman went on to explain that this was the most ancient of China's religions. Emphasising its learned credentials, he pointed out the large number of books written by its followers, who learn about the religion solely from books rather than orally from their parents. Moreover, not only do they refrain from worshipping ‘idols’ (but), they do not even permit idols to be kept.Footnote ⁴⁴ In approving terminology, which may have resonated even more positively with Muslim than Christian readers, he declared that they worship only one God, whom he described in plainly Islamic as much as Islamicate terms as unitary and single/incorporeal (wahid mujarrad).Footnote ⁴⁵

It is tempting to link this ‘unitarian’ presentation of Confucianism with the parallel conception of learned Hindus as the ‘unitarians of India’ (muwahidun-i Hind) in Dara Shikuh's Majma‘ al-Bahrayn (‘Meeting of the Two Oceans’), which was written around 1655; that is, slightly before or after Zaman's text.Footnote ⁴⁶ While as yet we have no direct evidence that Zaman was aware of Dara's text (or vice versa), it is worth noting that that Zaman's textual supplier Father Buzeo was also closely associated with Dara.Footnote ⁴⁷ Be that as it may, comparisons between the two works—and thence between the religion of these Indian and Chinese ‘unitarians’—may conceivably have occurred to some of their readers. If so, this would widen the scope of cross-cultural philosophical cosmopolitanism across early modern Asia, albeit with Europe playing an interstitial enabling role. Here we can perhaps glimpse a historical process at work, with Zaman's translation of Ricci's text on China being made around a century after the series of painted representations of Chinese and Southeast Asian peoples by an Indian artist working under Portuguese sponsorship along the network of Portuguese Indian Ocean trading ports.Footnote ⁴⁸

Returning to the evidence of the Ricci-Zaman texts, it was made clear to both of their readerships that, despite these monotheistic similarities, there were important differences between this highly intellectualised religiosity and Christianity and Islam. ‘Although those who follow the religion of the sages worship one God (yik khudā),’ Zaman continued,

However, this religion did promote one ritual practice carried out by emperors and commoners alike: the annual veneration of parents and ancestors.Footnote ⁵⁰ Despite his earlier statement about the ban on idols and the absence of temples, Zaman did subsequently concede that they venerated ‘images’ (sūrat, which Ricci termed similarly plainly as statua) of their founder.Footnote ⁵¹ Regarding the location of their activities, Zaman opted for a more decidedly Christianate term than Ricci himself by calling them ‘monasteries’ (dayr), which were built by the emperor in every city.Footnote ⁵² As for the founder of this religion, in orthographic testimony to the Latin transmission route of this pioneering Persian investigation of Chinese religions, rather than transcribe the Mandarin vocalisation Kǒng Fūzǐ, Zaman transliterated Confucius's name as Kīfūsiyūs.Footnote ⁵³

This mention of Confucius's name was important because it provided readers with a more specific identifier than the vaguer label of the ‘religion of the sages’, which might well be applied to many other religions. Latinised though it was, it was a label that would effectively stick: in Persian and Arabic no less than European-language works, the Latinate name Kunfūsiyus/Confucius has continued to identify the religion to the present day.

This was not the case with what we now call Buddhism. Since this religion lacked an accepted proper name in Latin no less than Persian, when Zaman wrote that ‘the second religion of the people of China is called Shakiyā and Umnūf’, there was a considerable amount at stake in his choice of nomenclature.Footnote ⁵⁴ But unfortunately, no reader of Persian would have recognised these two names, whether when the translation was first made in around 1650 or in the nineteenth century when it was published in Calcutta and Bombay. Because, for want of an existing name for Buddhism in Persian, Shakiyā and Umnūf were Zaman's transliterations (perhaps further muddled by scribal error) of Ricci's Latin labels, ‘Sciequia’ and ‘Omitose’. And for want of even a basic Buddhological vocabulary in early modern Europe, these were themselves Latinisations of vocalised Chinese characters which were in turn derived a thousand years earlier from Sanskrit.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a result, Zaman's readers may well have found it difficult to connect this mysterious cult with the religion that was said to have been founded in India (not China) by Shikmuni in the aforementioned Mongol-era Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh (as far as we know the most detailed prior Persian account of Buddhism).Footnote ⁵⁶

Even so, Zaman did transmit into the Persianate ‘connective system’ some important factual information about this unfamiliar faith. He explained, for example, that its teachings had been brought from the kingdom of Tianso (being Ricci's Thienso, from the Chinese Tianzhu), ‘which is now called Hindustan [India], in the sixty-fifth year after the birth of Jesus’.Footnote ⁵⁷ As he went on to explain, ‘in the histories of the people of China, it is written that the emperor of China sent ambassadors to import the religion due to a dream he had. The ambassadors then brought back a book.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Beyond this broadly accurate historical outline of the origins of Chinese Buddhism, Zaman followed Ricci by summarising the key doctrines of what he called ‘the religion of Shakiyā and Umnūf’, which included reincarnation (tanāsukh) into many different worlds. Although, he added, followers maintained the admirable virtues of asceticism (riyāzat) and chastity (pārsā’ī), and lived in monasteries, they also built great idol houses (but-khāna).Footnote ⁵⁹ In these, they kept many images made from bronze, marble, wood, and clay that were ‘frightening and strange (muhīb ū gharīb)’ in appearance. Although in basic detail, Zaman was translating what Ricci described, his choice of words served to reinforce what was, by the 1600s, a centuries-old Persianate stereotype, reinforced in countless poems, of the but-khāna-yi chīn—of China as the primordial land of idolatry. While poets had often deployed this image positively for aesthetic or spiritual effect, it nonetheless reflected a deeply limited conception of Chinese Buddhism. It also echoed the anti-Buddhist prejudices of Ricci and his Confucian informants.

Finally, Zaman followed Ricci in turning to the third religion of China, which in Persian he labelled ‘Lār Zū’ after the name of its founder, Lao Tzu (Laozi).Footnote ⁶⁰ This name, he explained, meant ‘elder sage’ (hakīm-i pīr), an allusion to the famous legend he then recounted: that Lao Tzu spent 80 years in his mother's womb before he was finally born as an old man. Again echoing Ricci's closer interaction with Confucian scholars and thence texts, Zaman provided less detail on the doctrines of Lar Zu, merely recounting a legend about a cosmic struggle between two emperors of the heavens.Footnote ⁶¹ Unaware, like Ricci, of the Dao De Jing, he declared that Lar Zu ‘wrote no book about this religion’.Footnote ⁶² Nonetheless, in a narrative taken from his Christian informant but which, through his choice of words, Zaman ensured had even greater resonance for Muslim readers, he added that after Lar Zu's death the ‘people of innovation’ (ahl-i bid‘at) compiled several books from a blend of other religions and their own imagination.Footnote ⁶³ For here came an echo from China of the traditional Muslim view of the Torah and Gospels as corrupted by the Jews and Christians.

Zaman's choice of the term ‘bid‘at’ (‘innovation’) is particularly interesting, since in Persian (and Arabic) theological writings it was a pejorative label that referred to doctrinal or ritual deviations introduced by later followers of a prophet. Reproducing Ricci's introductory framing narrative of how the Chinese had gradually strayed from their original monotheism, here was an explanation of China's religious pluralism as the outcome of spiritual degeneration. Nonetheless, this negative presentation of the religion of Lar Zu was more implicit than explicit. Despite the mention of ‘keeping images (tasāwīr) in their monasteries (dayr) of men who have gone up to the two heavens they believe in’, Zaman did not resort again to the vocabulary of idolatry—at least not until he painted a final general picture of religion in China, which emphasised the extraordinary number (‘thousands’) of idols found not only in religious sites, but in houses, markets, crossroads, courts, riverbanks, hospitals, palaces, and schools.Footnote ⁶⁴

Yet when at the end of the chapter, it came to drawing conclusions about the three religions, Ricci and Zaman viewed them through the same soteriological lenses. In following these religions, even the otherwise admirable Chinese sages ‘have fallen into error (ghalat) that leads to dangerous places (mahlaka), and hell (hāwiya), and so into heresy (ilhād) and infidelity (zandaqa)’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Once again, Zaman had taken Ricci's Latin Christian terminology, such as atheismo, and rendered it into the condemnatory vocabulary of Islamic heresiography.

Together, these examples illustrate the challenges of not merely translating a text from Latin into Persian, but of translating an account of unknown religious systems (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism) that were depicted in the terms of yet another (Christianity). The process of textual transmission involved the Chinese written characters (and their vocalisations) of Ricci's informants, for which Ricci tried to find Italian terms, then Trigault's Latin equivalents, for which Zaman in turn attempted to find Persian counterparts. The result was a triple layering of terminological representations that we might call ‘Confucianate’, ‘Christianate’, and ‘Islamicate’; that is, terms that drew from these particular religious traditions but depicted their various others.

In being embedded in the very vocabulary through which the text moved during its journey of translatio—of transfer from one cultural system to another—this process was all the more problematic in being invisible to readers, who were unable to compare the Latin and Persian versions for themselves. Through Ricci's book, Zaman had ventured far beyond the ‘shared knowledge and connective systems’ of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids. But in doing so, he had faced an even greater—because vicarious—challenge than Ricci of communicating knowledge from outside his own cultural-linguistic system about a land he had never seen for himself.

A second afterlife in print

In 1864, the Ricci-Zaman text was published in Calcutta with the generic title Tārīkh-i Chīn (‘The History of China’).Footnote ⁶⁶ This first imprint was apparently based on a manuscript transcribed in 1843 by Muhammad Najm al-Din of Delhi, an obscure copyist who acted as another go-between, this time between Zaman's Delhi and the Calcutta birthplace of Indo-Persian print.Footnote ⁶⁷ The decision to print the manuscript was made earlier in 1864 at a meeting of the Aligarh Scientific Society, recently founded by the celebrated Muslim reformist, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898).Footnote ⁶⁸ In a hint of its perceived value, it appeared in eighth position on a list of 28 ‘useful’ books on science, agriculture, geography, and history selected for publication by the Society's advisory council. Of the texts in the history category, most focused on India, with Persia, Andalusia, and ancient Greece receiving one apiece.Footnote ⁶⁹ Although Zaman's book was the only one that focused on a region east of India, it did resemble the others on the list in being a translation of a European work. But by this time, its link to Matteo Ricci was long forgotten: it was recorded as being written by ‘an English priest’ called ‘Father Axwells’—the English rendering of ‘Pādrī Īksūs’, thus further concealing its complex history.Footnote ⁷⁰

Describing the author as English was perhaps an understandable slip, since the Aligarh Scientific Society was adopting print as a Muslim educational response to the more recent British (rather than Italian) missionaries. Nonetheless, the Society still turned to these missionaries for help, resulting in their edition being printed by Calcutta's Baptist Mission Press, which over the previous half-century had pioneered the mass production of printed books in dozens of Indian scripts and languages. Such economies of scale placed the Ricci-Zaman text in the new print marketplace of Persian at a price of 12 annas.Footnote ⁷¹

However, print did not always spread accurate (not to say up-to-date) information. By the time the book was issued, the name of the original author on the bilingual cover had changed from the ‘Father Axwells’ of the Society's minutes to ‘Rev. Exoos’ (in English) and ‘Pādrī Īksūs’ (in Persian), which appeared with ‘Muhammad Zaman’ (in English, repeated in Persian with the addition of ‘Farangī Khwān’), and the name of the priestly intermediary, rendered in English as ‘Rev. Burnouf’ and in Persian as ‘Pādrī Būnū’ (who in Zaman's preface a couple of pages later became ‘Pādrī Būrnū’).Footnote ⁷² Even in the 1860s, transliteration—let alone translation—remained prone to subtle but significant errors, especially in what we might call ‘circulational translations’ that saw texts, names, and terms move between multiple scripts and languages.

Just under three decades later, Zaman's translation was printed again in Bombay. Hiding its origins still further, it now became part of a compendium volume called Mirāt al-Zamān dar Tārīkh-i Chīn u Machīn u Jāpān (‘The Mirror of the Times through the History of China, Greater China and Japan’). The volume was assembled by the émigré Īrānī publisher, Mirza Muhammad Shirazi, whose productivity won him the moniker Malik al-Kuttab (‘King of Books’).Footnote ⁷³ In his interpolated foreword to the volume, Shirazi claimed the text was a history of China written in 970 hijrī (1562–1563) by a Christian priest called ‘Iksus’, details he took from Zaman's original preface as it appeared in the preceding Calcutta edition.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although Shirazi mentioned that someone called ‘Farangī Khān’ had translated the text into Persian from English (again reproducing the errors on the cover of the Calcutta edition), he cut out Zaman's preface and name ‘Zaman’. This further concealed the true source of the text—unless the title he chose for the published version, Mirāt al-Zamān, was intended as a secret pun between ‘mirror of the times’ and ‘mirror of Zaman’.

In contrast to the edition issued by Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Aligarh Scientific Society, Shirazi's version reflected the more commercial imperatives of Bombay publishing. To issue Zaman's translation of Ricci qua ‘Iksūs’, Shirazi made use of one of Bombay's flourishing Gujarati printers, the Dutt Prasad Press. Following the publication in Bombay of several Gujarati works on the China trade, Shirazi seems to have been responding to corresponding interest among the large community of émigré Persian traders who were based in Bombay, a city that owed much of its wealth to the export of Malwa opium and by the 1890s was doing a brisk trade with Japan.Footnote ⁷⁵ After direct steamship links between Bombay and Yokohama were launched in 1885, an additional direct steamship line to Kobe was initiated in 1893—the year Shirazi published his book, in which he appended a translation about Japan to the Ricci-Zaman account of China.Footnote ⁷⁶

Shirazi also presumably had in mind the book market in Qajar Persia, where he exported many of his publications, and whence many fellow Shirazis were trading with Japan and China via British ports like Bombay. For Shirazi was very much a trade publisher: his output included various contemporary works, as well as classical Persian texts he made available in affordable printed editions.Footnote ⁷⁷ Reflecting the selection of books chosen by the Scientific Society, Shirazi's output included a history of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy drawn from European authors.Footnote ⁷⁸ Far from being a new colonial educational imposition, these works reflected the similar translation on Greek philosophy which ‘Abd al-Sattar made for the emperor Jahangir.

As Muslim scholars had long recognised, ‘indigenous’ informants were neither intrinsically superior nor otherwise preferable. Even if Shirazi, or Sayyid Ahmad beforehand, had known about alternative Persian accounts of China by Muslims, such as the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh or the Khitā’ī-nāma (‘Book of Cathay’) of Sayyid Ali Akbar Khita'i, they still chose wisely in opting instead to publish Zaman's translation of the ‘English’ book by a ‘Christian priest’.

The reason is that such earlier Muslim accounts of China were even more interpretively problematic, and factually outdated, than the Zaman/Ricci text. If the latter dated from the middle of the Ming era, then the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh dated from more than three centuries earlier in the Yuan/Mongol period. A subsequent report of the Timurid embassy to the early Ming that was incorporated into several Persian histories was far less detailed than Ricci/Zaman, focusing mainly on court protocol, while Ali Akbar Khita'i's sole account of Chinese religious life was a generic reference to ‘idol-houses’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, his Khitā’ī-nāma, written as it was by a Central Asian merchant in 1516, was the informational result of a mere three months spent on the trade route to Beijing as part of the Ming tribute system. Zaman's translation of Ricci was not only far more detailed than these earlier works, there was also an important qualitative difference. For Ricci had lived in China for nearly 30 years and, unlike the authors of the previous Persian works, had learned to speak and read Chinese. This has positive consequences for the relative accuracy of his information—flawed as its own perspectives, then translations, still were.Footnote ⁸⁰

So, when the Ricci-Zaman text was twice published in the nineteenth century, it placed before Indian and Iranian readers a wealth of information on China that was still otherwise unavailable.Footnote ⁸¹ Given the dearth of detailed texts on China available in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, or Arabic—the languages of those lingering ‘connective systems’—the decision to publish it made sense as there was nothing better available. Despite the fact that Zaman's translation was several centuries old, the Bombay publisher Shirazi used his own preface to talk up its contemporary relevance by using the fashionable modernist terms of the Muslim fin de siècle to claim the book showed how China had followed the ‘highway of progress’ (shāhrāh-i taraqqī) to achieve greatness through its pursuit of political unity, commercial acumen, and industrial excellence.Footnote ⁸² Ultimately, these topics—the discussion of statecraft, trade goods, and traditional crafts—were easier to translate than more abstract matters of religion. Fortunately, they were also the tangible transferable lessons that Muslim modernists were most eager to learn, whether from China (and Japan) or Europe.