AI-Assisted Semiotic Analysis of the Cultural Absence of the Zulfikar Sword in Chinese Islamic Visual Culture

The Zulfikar sword is a highly standardized sacred weapon symbol in Shia visual culture, forming a stable iconographic lineage across the Middle East and the Irano-Ottoman world. However, it is notably absent from Chinese Islamic visual traditions, resulting in a phenomenon of “cultural absence.” While existing studies interpret this absence through religious history and iconography, they lack verifiable visual-structural explanations. This study proposes a cross-cultural semiotic framework by constructing a triple-layered symbolic structure—semantic core, visual grammar, and cultural vehicle—and introduces the Cross-Cultural Symbolic Structure Adaptability Framework (CSSAF). An integrated visual corpus of Zulfikar representations, Chinese Islamic artefacts, and decorative patterns was assembled. Using pre-trained visual models, high-dimensional features were extracted and analyzed through dimensionality reduction, clustering, and discriminant methods to examine their relationships within latent space. A structurally and semantically constrained diffusion model was further employed to test the symbol’s potential integration into Chinese visual grammar. Results reveal that the Zulfikar symbol forms a stable, isolated cluster, lacking transitional continuity with Chinese Islamic decorative systems. Generative experiments show that attempted visual fusion results in superficial combinations rather than intrinsic integration. These findings demonstrate that the symbol’s absence arises from structural incompatibility between its strong semantic directionality and the decorative, de-subjectivised visual grammar of Chinese Islamic art. This study provides a quantifiable framework for examining cultural absence and offers a methodological reference for AI-assisted cross-cultural symbol analysis and generation.