Translating Tawḥīd: Chinese Tapekong in a Sundanese Islamic Manuscript
Abstract
This study examines how a Sundanese Muslim scholar, Raden Haji Muhammad Nuh of Cianjur (1879–1966), employed the Chinese term tapekong, referring to the deity Tua Pek Kong venerated in Chinese temples, as an antithetical reference to Islamic monotheism (tawḥīd) in his Sundanese Pegon translation and commentary (sharḥ) of the ‘Aqīdat al-ʿawām, a foundational creedal poem by Aḥmad al-Marzūqī (d. 1846). The central question is: Why did the translator choose a Chinese religious referent, rather than other non-Islamic traditions, to concretize shirk (polytheism), the theological antithesis of tawḥīd? Drawing on philological analysis of the manuscript and the scholarly framework of Islamic vernacularization, this study argues that the use of tapekong constitutes a deliberate act of theological localization. It transformed tawḥīd from an abstract doctrinal category into a socially embedded marker of communal identity, reflecting the multicultural milieu of the twentieth-century Sundanese community, particularly the Priangan region, where Chinese temples (kelenteng) represented the most visible form of religious alterity. This finding contributes to the study of Islamic theology in Southeast Asia by demonstrating how vernacular translations actively shape, not merely transmit, theological understanding through culturally situated rhetorical strategies.
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