Menhuan () is a term used by the Hui and Uyghur Muslim populations of China to indicate a Chinese Ṣūfī ṭarīḳa ("order" or "saintly lineage"). The leaders of a menhuan, which usually are Ṣūfī Muslim murs̲h̲id ("masters") or walī ("saints"), form a chain of spiritual successors over the ages, known in Arabic as silsilah, which goes back to the order's founder in China (e.g., Ma Laichi or Ma Mingxin), and beyond, toward his teachers in Arabia. One of Dillon's main sources is:
Menhuan () is a term used by the Hui and Uyghur Muslim populations of China to indicate a Chinese Ṣūfī ṭarīḳa ("order" or "saintly lineage"). The leaders of a menhuan, which usually are Ṣūfī Muslim murs̲h̲id ("masters") or walī ("saints"), form a chain of spiritual successors over the ages, known in Arabic as silsilah, which goes back to the order's founder in China (e.g., Ma Laichi or Ma Mingxin), and beyond, toward his teachers in Arabia.
==Origin of the term== The term itself is of comparatively recent origin: according to Ma Tong (1983), it was first attested in an essay by the Hezhou Prefecture Magistrate Yang Zengxin dated 1897. It has been suggested by Chinese researchers that it has developed from menfa (), meaning "powerful and influential family", or (), which has been used in the Northwestern China to mean "gateway" or "faction".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).