Isaac Mason

A Quaker in Sichuan

Isaac Mason (梅益盛, 1870–1939) was a missionary sent to China by the Friends' Foreign Mission Association, that is, the Quaker mission. Little is recorded of his early life; what can be confirmed is that he lived for many years in inland China and that his field was Sichuan. In 1905, together with Robert J. Davidson (1864 or 1865–1942), who was also in Sichuan, he wrote Life in West China, Described by Two Residents in the Province of Sz-chwan, published in London; the book opens with a "historical sketch of the Friends' mission in China." Later he moved to Shanghai and became an editor at the Christian Literature Society for China, while also serving as honorary secretary of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society; he was also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

An Honest Admission

The most important work of the second half of his life began with a rather honest admission. In the translator's preface to his 1921 book he wrote that, although he had lived in the interior for many years, had dealings with individual Muslims and had out of curiosity visited a few mosques, he "knew very little" about the Muslims of this land. The turning point came around 1917, when Samuel M. Zwemer visited China. Zwemer, later called "the Apostle to Islam," turned the attention of many missionaries in China to China's Muslims. Mason was able to work closely with him, and together they discussed approaches to bringing the gospel to Muslims.

Over One Hundred of One Hundred and Fifty

He was asked to prepare Christian literature for Muslims, and for this purpose he began a systematic study of Chinese Islamic literature. The scale of this research was remarkable for its time: by his own account, the known bibliography of works by Chinese Muslims numbered about one hundred and fifty titles, and he alone had collected more than one hundred of them. He also observed that most books of the Chinese Muslims were translated from Arabic and differed little in content from works already available in English, so there was little need to translate them, but one book was different.

Tianfang Zhisheng Shilu

That book was Tianfang Zhisheng Shilu (天方至圣实录, The True Record of the Utmost Sage of Arabia), written about two hundred years earlier by the Qing-dynasty Muslim Confucian scholar Liu Zhi (刘智, courtesy name Jielian 介廉); it was the most widely circulated life of the Prophet among Chinese Muslims. In 1921 Mason published an English translation of it under the title The Arabian Prophet: A Life of Mohammed from Chinese and Arabic Sources, with several appendices on Islam in China and a preface by Zwemer; it was printed by the Commercial Press in Shanghai and issued simultaneously in London and New York. In his preface he pointed out that this Chinese text differs considerably in several places from the lives of Muhammad current in the English-speaking world. For example, on Zaynab's marriage, the Chinese text presents her as a virgin who would marry no one but the Prophet, rather than as the wife of the Prophet's adopted son who was divorced and then remarried; one version gives rise to great scandal, the other is almost beyond reproach. Rewritings of this kind, "concessions to Chinese ideas," were exactly what he thought made the book worth translating: they show how Islam was understood and told in China.

Why Do This Work

The question he cared about was clear. Nestorian Christianity had once vanished from China like water soaking into sand, and the historical Jewish communities had done much the same; yet Islam had survived for more than a thousand years in a place so far from its birthplace and in an environment so different, and its adherents had grown to several million. He attributed this to the image of the Prophet himself in the hearts of his followers, and so, to understand China's Muslims, one must first read the life of the Prophet that they read. In 1922 he lectured at the China Society in London and published The Mohammedans of China. In it he cited Marshall Broomhall's Islam in China and G. F. Andrew's The Crescent in North-West China, discussed the widely differing estimates of the time for China's Muslim population, ranging from four million to thirty million, and inclined toward a figure of about eight million. In 1928 he also published in Shanghai Notes on Christian Literature for Chinese Moslems, issued by the Society of Friends of Moslems in China (中国回民之友会).

The Same Network

His contemporary Claude L. Pickens, Jr. (毕敬士) also worked among Muslims in northwest China. In the 1920s and 1930s a small but serious circle formed of people who treated China's Muslims as a subject requiring dedicated study and writing. Zwemer was the central figure of this circle, and Mason's translations and bibliographical work were among its most solid contributions. He died in 1939.