Ma Fu-ch’u was a Chinese author and poet, probably from the 18th Century, who wrote the poem “The Three-Character Rhymed Classic on the Ka‘bah”, translated and commented upon by J. Peter Hobson in the Summer-Autumn 1980 edition of Studies. In writing about the author, Hobson notes: “This [Ma Fu-ch’u] is not immediately discernible as a Muslim name, for it is not Arabic or recognizably derived from Arabic, and it conforms to the Chinese convention of a family name followed by a given name consisting, as is usual, of two characters. Ma is the most common family name in Muslim China and corresponds to Muhammad of which it is a distant, monosyllabic contraction; Fu-ch’u means ‘restoring—or returning to—the beginning’. The name must surely bespeak the man.”