I asked the soft-spoken waiter if we could have an order of pork ribs, and he replied that they only had " qīngzhēng de." I'd never had "steamed" (清蒸) pork ribs before, but said I'd take an order anyway - before realizing, from the pained expression on his face, that he had meant qīngzhēn. (Dru Gladney suggested translating it as tahára, "ritual or moral purity.") 清真 is currently used in Chinese only to talk about food or (in 清真寺) mosques: you couldn't describe a person as being 清真, or say that a country following Islamic religious law was 清真.Ībout a year ago, I was out at a Yunnan restaurant with some friends and I thought I remembered having gotten pork ribs there before. One thing to keep in mind is that 清真 does not quite match up to the words "Muslim" or "halal" as they're used in English. (The 汉语大词典 says Ming and Qing dynasties Wikipedia says Yuan and Ming dynasties.) The modern sense of 清真 seems to come from Ming-dynasty Chinese translations of Muslim texts (either the Qur'an or others) or writings on Islam containing lines like “真主原有独尊, 谓之清真” and "至清至真," and Allah is still referred to as 真主 today - which is to say, as far as I can tell it seems to be a native Chinese term, rather than a sound loan. The word was actually used in some Daoist contexts in that sense it didn't get associated with Islamic practices until a while later. Just to clarify, Li Bo used 清真 (in the lines "聖代復元古 / 垂衣貴清真") to mean "pure and unadorned" or something along those lines.
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