Ha Decheng

Ha Decheng (1888–1943) was a Chinese Muslim scholar from Nanzheng in Shaanxi, known by his religious name Hilal al-Din — "crescent of the faith" — a leading ahong of the Republic of China and one of the four great ahongs of modern China, alongside Wang Jingzhai, Ma Songting and Da Pusheng. He performed the hajj in 1913, co-founded the Shanghai Islamic Normal School in 1928, published a Chinese translation of the Qur'an's first three volumes, and spent his last years at Shadian in Yunnan helping his student Ma Jian with the translation of the whole Qur'an. ¹

There is no English, Arabic or Urdu article on him; this page rests on the Chinese article, as stated in its sources.

He was born at Nanzheng in Shaanxi and moved to Shanghai with his father Ha Xiling as a boy. He studied the Confucian books as a child, learned Arabic from his father, and at sixteen went to Zhenjiang in Jiangsu and to Henan to study under Muslim scripture teachers; he then served as teaching elder of Shanghai's Zhejiang Road Mosque, teaching himself Arabic, Persian, English and Urdu as he went. In 1913 he performed the hajj, returning in 1914 to found the Xiexing Company, whose overseas-trade profits were to be used to train Chinese Muslim talent; in 1919 he was the company's manager in Ceylon and Egypt. Back in Shanghai in 1924 he helped organise the Chinese Hui Teaching Society and its monthly journal, and translated the Qur'an, publishing the first three volumes in Chinese. In 1928 he and Da Pusheng and others founded the Shanghai Islamic Normal School, which sent its best graduates to study in Egypt. When the full-scale war with Japan came in 1937 he organised charity work in Shanghai's concessions; in 1941, under the borrowed name Ma Guocheng, he escaped alone to Chongqing, declined a Nationalist government appointment, and went instead to Shadian in Yunnan, where he helped his student Ma Jian with the complete translation of the Qur'an and taught in the advanced class of the Yangzheng Arabic college. He died at Shadian on 25 October 1943, aged fifty-six by Chinese reckoning. ¹

His faith is recorded as unknown. The Chinese article, his only one, presents him as a leading ahong and an educator in Qur'anic studies; it names no school, order or movement for him, and Wikidata carries no religion value for him at all. ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.