Sino-Muslims, Networking, and Identity in Late Imperial China: Longstanding Natives and Dispersed Minorities

2013

Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in in Hezhou (Linxia), Gansu province, from 2009 to 2010 and one month of follow-up research in 2012, this historical legal ethnography argues that Chinese Muslims (Hui) practice a form of , heavily influenced by Chinese custom and constrained by socialist law, that is, in turn, formative of a mixed legal subjectivity. In the reform era or what I call 'uncanny China,' academic and political discourses label "Hui customary law," a foil to legal modernity. I propose an alternative to Hui customary law in , an amalgamation of revealed sources and Han Chinese-influenced customs that is limited by socialist law. illustrates legal creolization, marked by the collapse of categories and the emergence of novel forms. Han nevertheless demonstrates the familiar division between ritual and transactional aspects of Islamic law. The operation of these areas of law varies in the context of the Northwest. Whereas purity law unites the Hui against the non-Muslim Han, devotional aspects of law vary between the jiaopai (teaching schools) and menhuan (Sufi organizations). Jiaopai are differentiated "instituted fantasies" that link Hui to various Muslim heartlands, partially through orthopraxis. Hence, ritual matters are the basis for jiaopai's imagined diasporas vis-à-vis multiple Islamic authorities. In the area of social transactions, including family law, marriage, divorce, inheritance, and property, jiaopai differences matter less. However, adherence to such areas of law is no less fundamental to being Hui. demonstrates plural patriarchies in both substance and procedure. Local Muslim leaders called ahong mediate disputes regarding family law and, in so doing, mediate the variant sources of . Procedurally, their patriarchal authority is appropriated by that of the Party-State. Ethnographic data, including interviews, observations of ritual process, legal transactions and disputing, and analysis of textual and archival material shows to be a field of contest. Drawing from semiotics, practice theory and psychoanalysis, this dissertation shows that the diverse and occasionally contradictory sources of law, authority, and power in are reflected in Hui subjectivity-a source of ambiguity and sometimes melancholia. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Matthew S. Erie was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1976. He completed a B.A. with honors at Dartmouth College in 1999, with a double major in English and History and a minor in Anthropology. In 2000, he volunteered in the Philippines, India, Thailand, Burma, and Nepal. In Dharamsala, he worked with Tibetan refugees. He traveled to China to understand the Chinese side of the argument regarding Tibet and ethnic minorities more generally. He began his graduate study at Cornell in 2002 and started the Ph.D. program in anthropology at Cornell in 2004. In that year, he first traveled to China, living there for a year studying Mandarin. From 2005 to 2008, he pursued a J.D. at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, one year of which was spent at Tsinghua University School of Law where he completed an LL.M. in Chinese law. He conducted preliminary field research on minority issues in Northwestern China, traveling extensively through Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. Funded by Fulbright-Hays and the National Science Foundation, his dissertation research was based in Hezhou (Linxia) from 2009 to 2010. In 2012, he studied intensive classical Arabic in Amman, Jordan. He currently practices law in New York City. iv DEDICATION To Teacher Feng who started me on this journey, and Yaej for seeing me through it. apologies, in advance, for anyone whom I have inadvertently omitted. I note two particularities of my acknowledgments. One, this dissertation project proceeded in step with long-standing conversations with Chinese anthropologists, lawyers, and friends in a period of heightened distrust and skepticism between U.S. and Chinese academics. I have particularly sought to include Chinese scholarship in my dissertation and I underscore my "harvest" from these dialogues. Second, while I have engaged Chinese counterparts, I do not claim that they support my views; in many cases, they outright disagree with me. Due to the stances I take and the sensitive nature of the material covered in the dissertation, I cannot name many of those who helped me most at various field sites in the Northwest. Foremost, I acknowledge Steven Sangren, the chair of my special committee, for his careful and principled instruction in the field of anthropology. From the many times in class he has corrected my inaccuracies or demanded more precise language in my writing, I owe him the largest intellectual debt. In a discipline where scholars often chase intellectual fads, Professor Sangren has instilled in my approach to anthropology an appreciation for its fundamental and enduring questions. In addition to Professor Sangren, the minor members of my committee, including

日本中東学会年報, 2003

JapanAssociation forMiddle East Studies resulted in vain. 'Ihey never tried to study why SiReMuslims had strong nationalistic se" ' ' timent toward China and thus had no reason to supportJapan. '' 'Ilieir "failures" can be attributed to the improvised plan cerresponding to Japan's military policy. Severa1 Japanese fortune-seekers (1;gin-ku Ronin) in China had corrverted to Islam during the 1920s and 30s as}d their vague knowledge of Islam was utilized to conduct further Islamie study. 'IIiey shared, kowever, the same biased 'impressions toward Islam in China. Fbr instance, tihey believed that Sino-Muslims should be anti¢ omamunists, since eommunists asserted atheisrn ar}d extemiination of religions. 'lhey aiso considered that Sino-M"slims could be on Japan's side because of ethnic dl$crimination by the Han. In addition, they were alsu caught by the precokception that all the ethnic tninorities should have a tendency of calling for political independence against the ruling ethnic group. After WWII, Isiamic studies in Japan shifted from China and Southeast Asia to the Middle East Studies on Islam in Chifia were aimost abandoned and neglected until the 1980s. The "tradition" and the accumulation of Islamic studies in China were not taken into consideration even in the field of Chinese studies. Accordingly, researchers on Islam didn't emphasize that Sino-Muslims also fought against the Japanese Army during the Anti-Japanese War. The historical fact that the AntiJapanese War was also "IslamJapanese War" in sorne means has been hidden, discarded, and forgotten intentionally. During the war, Sin}Muslims persisted in Islamic protection and promotion within the framework oi the state of China, represented by a popular slogan ofAigaso Aijiao er "Loving our country is equivalent to loving our religien". This paper discusses how ethnicity building of the Hdei conducted by inte11ectuals of Sino-Muslims in the Repttblican era (1912-l949) was active ar}d why they were extremely patriotic toward their hemeland China during the AntiJapanese War. Islamic intexpreta= tions brought from the Middle East, in particular from Egypt, had authority to modify their ethni,city as a political subiect. rlhey also changed eld-fashioned Chinese Islam so far into "aut/hentic" Islam in order to catch up to the standard of the "advamced" lslamic world, ancl gave eoncrete reasen$ of the resistance against the aggressor; Japan. Because of this Middle Eastern impact, most Sino-Muslims had the reasons of disobedience to Japan'$ intrigue, quite difterent from Japan's partial sttccess of the divicieand-rule policy in Imier Mongolia during the 3es and 40s. IE. Sino-Mustims' Que$t tor ldentity and the Reason d'Otre 1. Discrimination amplified in the Modern Era AJAMESno.

2018 Modern Chinese Muslims' increasing connections with the Islamic world conditioned and were conditioned by their elites' integrationist politics in China. Chinese Muslims (the "Hui") faced a predicament during the Qing and Ottoman empire-to-nation transitions, seeking both increased contact with Muslims outside China and greater physical and sociopolitical security within the new Chinese nation-state. On the one hand, new communication and transport technologies allowed them unprecedented opportunities for transnational dialogue after centuries of real and perceived isolation. On the other, the Qing's violent suppression of Muslim uprisings in the late nineteenth century loomed over them, as did the inescapable Han-centrism of Chinese nationalism, the ongoing intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Han, and the general territorial instability of China's Republican era (1911-49). As a result, Islamic modernism-a set of positions emphasizing both reason and orthodoxy, and arguing that true or original Islam is compatible with science, education, democracy, women's rights, and other "modern" normstook on new meanings in the context of Chinese nation-making. In an emerging dynamic, ethos, and discourse of "transnationalist integrationism," leading Chinese Muslims transformed Islamic modernism, a supposedly foreign body of thought meant to promote unity and renewal, into a reservoir of concepts and arguments to explain and justify the place of Islam and Muslims in China, and in so doing made it an integral component of Chinese state-and nation-building.

In this ethnographic sketch, I analyze the complex processes of Sino-Islamic identity formation by examining the variety and diversity of locally produced "authenticity," situated within a global understanding of Islam. Even within a single province, among a single official minzu (nationality) that People's Republic of China propaganda, media, and scholarship often construct as a unified, static group, localized practices and processes of identity formation are remarkably diverse. This article investigates how trans/national discourses and practices of Islamic authenticity are localized within two specific field sites: the provincial capital of Kunming and the rural Muslim enclave of Shadian. For the purposes of this article, I focus primarily on how life is temporally and spatially structured, both in everyday practice and in imaginings of one's place in history, modernity, the Muslim world, and the Chinese state. By setting out details of the daily lives of two Hui Muslim women, I aim to elucidate how temporal and spatial structures of life, which are tied to urban or rural location, reflect and shape local identity formation. I argue that as actors involved in their own self-production, Hui Muslims in Kunming and Shadian negotiated, appropriated, and contested both monolithic notions of Islam and the official statepropagated minzu classificatory system, producing their own versions of authentic Hui Muslim identities. What constituted authentic Hui Muslim identity depended to a great extent on the residence of the individual.