The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture series, under the Cornell East
Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints of this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy. We're starting off tonight with an old and dear returning friend Professor Matthew
Erie uh finished his PhD here at Cornell, uh in this very building, yes, in Anthropology in 2013.
He went on to do a postdoc at Princeton for two years, after which he joined the faculty of Oxford,
where he is now an assistant professor, and uh has been working on uh among other things the topic about which he speaks tonight,
near and dear to his heart. So without any further ado and with
all thanks to Anthropology both her training and for co-sponsoring him
And he's here.
This is an amazing community. Uh this morning I went for a run uh at five and five in the morning
uh and everybody I came across uh smiled at me and said good morning. You can't get that everywhere.
And I know that I benefited tremendously from being a member of this community roughly from
2002 to 2013. I wasn't here the whole time - I was off doing some other things in the meanwhile,
but I just want to take a moment to thank the Chinese language teachers, the librarians,
the administrators, and certainly the students and the faculty members for doing what you do,
and for giving what you give, thank you. I've been asked to talk about my book, and the book talk is
uh it's a bit of a new genre for me, this is uh the first time I've actually written a book, the first
time I've spoken publicly about my book, and it's a little bit of an awkward genre, I think, because
I've always thought of the academic talk as a kind of unwritten contract between the speaker and the
audience. The speaker is providing information and the audience is giving their time and expertise in
terms of critical feedback to improve the work under discussion and this contract is somewhat
obligated by a piece of work that's already out out the door, but nevertheless, I want to
make a kind of compromise. I'm going to be talking about the major impetus of the book, the kind of
the central question, why I wrote the book, and also give you kind of the key the key to the book
and then use that key to analyze a new problem that's arisen since, uh since writing the book.
So hopefully this is a happy middle um uh for us. Um so for quite some time I've been drawn to the
problem of Chinese law. There's a long genealogy of thought going back to {Max Weber} and {Marcel Grenay}
that China did not have law, and, yet, China has one of the oldest legal traditions of any civilization
anywhere, going back to the Tang Code 7th century. So law is somehow very problematic in China.
It's far from the autonomous notion of law that we fetishize here in the US. It's closely linked to
political authority to personal relationships and social institutions. So the main kind of question
to the book is "How can we study law in China ethnographically?" This was the central motivation
to to its writing. If if Chinese law is not peripheral enough to a mainstream law
specialist orientation, I moved further to the periphery in examining the place of Islamic law
in Chinese society. Islamic law is also problematic from the view of western comparative law. It's
seen as irrational, right, the famous {Gaudi} justice metaphor of Weber seen as brutal, corporal, or worse,
and examine the relationship between these two orphans of comparative law,
Chinese law and Islamic law, the question is what can we learn about them that we cannot when we
perceive them through the lens of western law. So I'm interested in their interactions as they
engage each other. I should just note that this image here is uh taken uh taken this
summer uh by me in Yinchuan in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. This is the so-called Zhong-Aa Zhi Zhou,
the Sino-Arab axis, which is a grand plaza they're building as part of the so-called
New Silk Road Project, which links China with the Middle East. The book then is an ethnographic study
of the contemporary practice of Islamic law by Muslim minorities and its relationship to state
law in the fields of family law, marriage, property, finance, charity, procedure, and dispute resolution.
The book investigates that which is concealed and that which can be glorified at the intersection
of Islam and the secular, religious minorities in the state, female authority and patriarchy,
and the globalizing and the nationalizing. It's ethnographic, so this is inherently uh descriptive,
but also explanatory. I attempt to explain the relationship between Muslim minorities and their
law on one hand, and state functionaries and their law on the other, through the concept of "min jian"
and I'm going to describe that in a moment. "Min jian", as one modality, characterized that character
characterizes this relationship and has done so for much of the modern period. All of that
changed about six months ago, um ALMOST, okay, and I'll explain in a moment what I mean.
Um there's been a nationwide debate that sees China since this past March, a debate about the
so-called "qingzhen fanhua": the spread of halal, that is overtoned very similar to what, we, in
the US, call "sharia creep." Indeed, this is the first time sharia, meaning Islamic law and ethics, a very
contested notion amongst Muslims, has entered the public sphere in modern Chinese history.
The test of any argument is whether it has stained power as a source of explanation. The "spread of
halal" is, in some ways, an inversion of what I write about in the book: it's an unchoreographed paroxysm
of discontent. What I will argue today is that the thesis of the book illuminates one modality of
Muslim state interaction interactions, the "min jian", that perseveres even though Chinese Muslim, the Hui,
have attempted to resolve the "spread of halal" problem, specifically, their efforts
to turn their taboo into a constitutionally protected statute. This evinces a second
modality, what we might call Law with a capital L. In doing so I'll be drawing comparatively on
two disparate disciplines: Anthropology and Law, for while anthropologists have much to say about taboo,
they have written less about the practices of legislating taboos, although the creek of
modernity in the in the modernization theory has been central to Anthropology; and lawyers have a
lot to say about modern law but less so about the possibilities of law's origins in taboos.
So the main question then of the book is "How did China's 23+ million Muslims abide by sharia
in a post-socialist state that does not recognize the legitimacy of religious law?" It's an empirical
question but one with broader implications for the study of Law and Society, Anthropology, Chinese
Studies, and Islamic Studies. Addressing this question or even asking this question,
I'm assuming an unpopular stance that, what is doing the work here is actually
law. Lawyers would say no, no this is not law, we don't have constitutions, courts, binding authority;
anthropologists would say, you're probably committing the fault of imposing a western
category on something which uh is not law at all. Islamic Studies currently is um is
has taken an ethical turn post uh (intelligible) in its study of Islam, particularly sharia.
And even some ultra-elite Hui in China have told me, it's not law, it's tradition. So why do I make
this assertion? First most Hui, almost all Hui, use the term "Jiaofa" to describe what I'm calling law.
So "Jiaofa" literally means religious law, or law of the teaching.
They do not use "Jiaoli", which would be something like religious ethics, okay, ethics of the teaching.
Nevertheless, skepticism remains. When I asked a senior Hui along the muddy banks of the Yellow
River in the city of Lanzhou, whether what they call "Jiaofa" is really law, he became quite
agitated explaining "we consider it law, if we fail to abide what the Quran says, in this life, then we
will be punished in the afterlife. Activities like daily prayer, fasting, and giving alms (speaks Arabic).
These we must do! If you do not think these are law, then you do not understand Islam. So I take these
categories seriously. I believe this is part of the task of an anthropologist, but not so uncritically.
Analytically, there is a kind of aspiration to law. Nevertheless the content of the law
itself is heavily inflected with ethical and moral content, not to mention, taboo.
To understand "Jiaofa", I conducted field work in northwest China for approximately two years.
My main field site is the city Lin Xia, in imperial times called He Zhou, which Hui called
"China's Little Mecca" for its large number of Muslims: there's a population about 275 000
people in the city, half of whom are Muslim, mainly Hui, but also Dongxiang, Bonan,
Salar, a few Uyghurs and some non-Muslim minorities mainly Tibetans, and there's a small sprinkling of
Muslim Tibetans there as well. In addition, I traveled to other Muslim centers in northwest
China, including Ningxia Autonomous Region, Qinghai and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Sharia under PRC law has no legal basis. Not unlike the United Kingdom, where I currently
live, but in the UK there is a robust civil society that includes religious arbitration,
that can be upheld by civil court, so this is after a 1996 arbitration act,
a court could may uphold the decision of an arbitration council, even one that is
not secular. In the US, courts may consider sharia as a source of foreign law in deciding a matter, we
also have many traditions of religious arbitration, for example, the Beth Din Rabbinical Councils,
these are a very popular uh very popular as well. Under liberal law then, there are
spaces, however, contested for practices of religious law, yet, sharia has tested this.
So just to show you uh briefly these are some of the places that I visited in my field research,
I spent a lot of time in mosques and also in Sufi tunes, which are the images in the upper right,
engaging conversations with clerics, who are called Ahong in Chinese after the Persian Ahun.
So sharia has tested these liberal spaces under Anglo-American law, 15 years after 9-11,
where are we? We have debates in the UK about sharia council. Sharia councils are not religious
arbitration, they apply commercial law, sharia councils are mainly engaged in disputes
between family members, mainly matters of divorce. France is agitated by the burkini, as an offense to
Laïcité - their version of secularism, and closer to home presidential candidate Donald Trump
wants to enact "a total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the US. These
debates show quite vividly that we've moved away from the definition of secularism as separation of
church and state, to one where following Hussein Agramah in his 2012 book questioning secularism,
"secularism involves the fashioning of religion as an object of continual management and intervention,
and the shaping of religious life and sensibility to fit the presumptions
in ongoing requirements of liberal governance." While the neoliberal state is often
the point of entry in these assessments, how does it work in China? I should
mention that before the term secularism, or secularity, or the secular came into vogue,
anthropologists, sociologists, historians of religion in China have long recognized
that the historical Chinese state has made investments in religion through replicating or
mainstreaming ritual practices, incorporating orthodoxies, or discarding heterodoxies,
or otherwise appropriating celestial bureaucracies. So the works of Maurice Friedman, Arthur Wolf,
Steve Sangrin, C. K. Yang, Stefan Foshtong, Bob Weller, Hanstein Muelle,r and several others.
In the book I start from this basis to argue that nowhere are these dynamics more apparent than
in the question of contemporary Islam in China. The central finding of the book is that rather
than opposition between state law and sharia, a perception that colors much of the discourse in
of on Islam in the West, in China, sharia occupies a middle ground where a number of actors, state and
non-state, Hui, Han, men and women, assert their own interests through negotiation, collaboration, and
meeting and meetings of the minds. This is possible because sharia is a "min jian" law. "Min jian" literally
means "between the people or among the people." It's usually translated as unofficial or popular.
The "min jian" happens off the official script of China's orchestrated management of religions,
but nevertheless can be selectively appropriated by the official script in a process that the ever-
fashionable yet opt-cryptic Giorgio again been another important voice in the theorization of
secularism has called "glorification." Sharia can serve as a middle ground because it is "min jian." The
key here is this this process of "min jian" - it's one of engagement between and among the the official
and the unofficial, with particular emphasis on the alignment of interest even under arbitrary rule.
Note that the model here is not one of domination and resistance that is has characterized much of
the literature on ethnic minorities in China, nor is it that the Hui or the the lackey of the state,
the sort of automaton, uh the untrue Muslim, or the model minority. Nevertheless, their world is
very much characterized by the the "min jian" and so, in the course of my field work, I repeatedly
came across this concept, for example, mediation unofficial mediation led by unofficial clerics,
those were then that were not registered by the state, some people, Hui in particular,
engaged in unofficial diplomacy vis-à-vis co-religionists in the Middle East. These
are methods and paths and channels that don't go through state mechanisms and even sometimes
Hui clerics are asked to participate in what are called "unofficial investigations"
after an accident happens, for example, somebody driving a car hits a bicyclist, the clerics are
asked to participate in the process of collecting evidence to determine the outcome of the dispute.
"Min jian" is a, I argued, defining characteristic of state society relations through
and it has been through most of the reform period, uh but we see roots in the late imperial period
uh at that time, we saw the categories of "modern law" ethnic custom first entering Chinese
lexicon often through the universal language of empire. These became the building blocks of
discursive and institutional boundaries. "Min jian" is beyond or underneath the official it at once blurs
and enables these boundaries, so I want to show you uh how this works in practice. So this is an image
of a mosque in Ningxia and it has the couplets on both sides of the entryway. You can see I'm
not sure if you can read the Chinese characters on the right, but I can read it for you, it says
Jin Si Ji Zhu Zan Sheng 进寺记主赞圣
which means, entering the mosque, remember to praise the prophet. On the left it says
Chu Si Zun Ji Shou Fa 出寺遵纪守法
leaving the mosque, when leaving the mosque, respect the institutions and obey the law. So in entering
in the mosque, obey the teachings of the prophet Muhammad, follow his behavior, his sayings and
deeds: this is the idea of the Sunnah. But when you leave the mosque you follow PRC law - that's when
PRC law has precedence. But note on the top, there's yet a third line. This one says
Ren Zhu Du Yi 认主独一
recognize the oneness of the Lord - the Lord here being god. This is the concept, the doctrine of
the oneness of god or the Tawhid: the idea that god is not divisible in Islam and thus the
one of the points of conflict with Christianity, as the Muslims perceive Christianity. This sets
up a clear opposition through spatial marking: the prophet's law is inside the mosque, the state law
is outside the mosque. As anthropologists know boundaries are honored more in the breach than
in the observance. Boundaries and borders have been crucial not only to
as a theme, not only in anthropology but in law as well. So looking at the anthropology of boundaries,
we have the idea that boundary is vital for the idea of identity. So beginning with Durkheim
"Elementary Forms of Religious Life", of course the difference between the sacred and profane, right.
Even Marx in the 18th (unintelligible) talks about class boundaries; famously Weber and his "Economy and
Society" discusses the differences among ethnic and status groups has bounded. Over the last several
decades, there's been a shift in anthropology from the notion of culture is bounded unit to one that
operates in a deteriorlized and globalized world, where such deterioration through boundary crossing,
borderlands, interstitial zones, etc., may enhance cultural identity rather than dilute it. A good
data point on this is Alvarez's 1995 article "The Mexican-US Border: The Making of an Anthropology
of Borderlands. This line of thought can be traced to Edmund leech in his 1964 political system of
highland Burma, and later that of his student Frederick Barth who emphasized the mutability
and situatedness of so-called ethnic categories. in which boundaries rather than cultural cores are
central in perpetuating ethnic identities. So we can see in this didactic writing on the outside of
the mosque an attempt to maintain some semblance of boundaries. Following Durkheim, the rules of
separation are a distinguishing mark of the sacred: again, inside: religious law; outside: state law that
is constitutive of uh Hui identity uh to be Muslim, one must follow the example the prophet Muhammad;
to be a Chinese citizen, one must follow socialist law. Yet Hui pass through this entrance every day.
Question remains: is this a simple process? Is it fraught?
Do they face difficult decisions in passing through? Moving from anthropology to law in
terms of how law is perceived boundary, here the notion of jurisdiction reigns. Jurisdiction speaks
to the bounds of authority or who can apply which rule to whom. US jurisprudence is based on personal
jurisdiction the the parties to dispute, subject matter jurisdiction, um the law and the facts,
in territorial jurisdiction, so geographic concerns. There are reams of case law and statutes that are
based upon these core principles of jurisdiction, for example the idea of extraterritorial
jurisdiction: how it is you hold those that are outside the geography of the sovereign state to
the law of the land or for acts committed outside the geography of the state. We can also see this
in the notion of conflict of laws, right, or as the Europeans call it "private international law." Uh in
the US, we have a long jurisprudence about the distinctions between state and federal law: how
you decide which law applies. this is what we call conflict of laws; and international
law we have discussions about what's called "municipal" or "state law" versus "international law."
So it's not just state law but also non-state law that can be involved in a conflict of
law, for example, religious law. The notion of uh "separation of church and state"
is also about boundary maintenance: one could trace it back to the religious wars in 16 17
16 17th century Europe, um at the basis of the modern notion of the state, uh informed uh ideas
uh basic core ideas of sovereignty and state power, not necessarily through the triumph of
rationalism but as scholars have shown, for example, the political theologians like Carl Schmidt,
that with the breakdown of the old order, for example the great chain of being, that was believed
to have been designed by god, the authority of divine law and natural law was shifted from god
to the state, making the king Christ-like and the state a metaphysical entity.
Our own first amendment of the US constitution, which has the religious clauses, can be traced back
to these religious wars in England, France Germany, where one denomination seized political power
in the authority of the state over other denominations.
Hui are everyday transgressing boundaries, however. Hui cadres must take off their white
cap, you can see the gentleman, they wear the "Baimaozi" the white cap, when they go to work. So
if they're members of the Chinese communist party and they work in a government office
you take off the cap, you put the cap back on when you go to the mosque during one of your daily
prayers. After work if you're so inclined if you go to a KTV, or karaoke bar,
or as they're springing up in places like (unintelligible) a brothel, you also take off your cap and therefore
you look effectively Han: there's really no uh physiological difference between Hui
and Han - well there's there's some if you spend a lot of time there, but nevertheless
they're fairly similar based upon appearance. It's just the white cap that distinguishes them. But
the question remains whether sharia "Jiao Fa" also travels with the Hui as they leave the mosque. And
the answer there is is it does. They get married in accordance with sharia, they may allocate property
in an agreement, either oral or written, also in accordance with sharia. They may establish a (speaks Arabic)
a pious endowment, also in line with Islamic law - all these happen outside that realm of the mosque.
Qingzhen is a is a key term. It's translated as "pure and true" the literal translation
of the two characters that constitute it. Believed to have entered Chinese via Judaism,
as is one theory amongst several, uh it's seen as a marker with a number of meanings often
nested within each other. So most narrowly, Qingzhen means halal - permissible as applied to food.
The second larger meaning would be a synonym with legal, more generally okay, Qingzhen meaning
legal. Third, it's a synecdoche for Islam itself. Dru Gladney, in his 1987 dissertation
entitled Qingzhen, explores the concept, Barbara Pillsbury and her work in Taiwan, Marist Gillette
and Xi'An, and several others have explored the dimensions of this concept. In his subsequent
1991 book, Gladney argues that Qingzhen for the Hui means much more than halal, but is, following Geertz,
"a sacred symbol" - a total expression of Hui identity, but one which is internally discordant and debated.
So Qingzhen applies both to Hui at the macro level, so, for example, the name for a mosque is Qingzhen Si 清真寺
right - the temple of the pure and the true. The name for the Shahadah - the declaration of faith -
is Qingzhen Yan 清真言, or the speech of the pure and the true. So these apply to Hui everywhere and
yet within those terms, within these concepts, there is constant debate and disagreement. For example,
over what a mosque should look like, over whether or not one should pray first or break the fast
first during the month of Ramadan. Indeed, Gladney remarks that Qingzhen follows Hui wherever they go,
Taipei, Bangkok, and Rosemea, California. Gladney did his field work in the 1980s, since then Hui or at
that time, I should say Hui were just beginning to experience the benefits of economic development;
since then we've seen a blossoming of Qingzhen, as Hui continued to expand beyond Hui enclaves
into Han dominated areas. And the result of that is we see a kind of excess of the sign: we see
Qingzhen on toothpaste, soap, barber shops, street signs, and other infrastructure. It's on clothing,
clothing shops, perfume, and ensigns. All this has led to what critics call "Qingzhen Fanhua" - the
spread of halal. So you can see some of these images here, upper left, you see a halal coffee
shop; going to the right a fast food store, a general store, a barber shop, soap, another
supply store, a shower that's halal; this is halal milk; down here in the bottom we have halal tofu,
and then a whole shelf of products that are all Qingzhen.
Uh in recent years, very recently, Qingzhen has extended beyond the Chinese borders
through the export of halal food to Malaysia, Egypt, Qatar, the UAE, etc.,
the Ningxia Autonomous Region, as of 2010, has approximately 1.5 billion US dollars in sales,
and halal goods - 1 million of that to the Middle East. This is a huge industry. All this is incited,
as I mentioned, a nationwide debate about Islam in China and freedom of religion. So I want to
back up a little bit, and flesh out some of the background, and then and then proceed into the
analysis. So as I mentioned, since the 1980s, we see a steady increase in the quality of living for all
Chinese in the mainland, but Hui, in particular, have done very well during this period. They're
very adept at mobilizing commercial networks for their own material and spiritual benefit.
There's a lack of quantitative data on this point; although, Ma Rong, a Hui sociologist at Beida, has
collected data on Tibetan and Uyghur standards of living in the Tibetan autonomous region, in
the Xinjiang autonomous region. respectively. To make the argument that there has been an increase
in standards of living, looking at household disposable income, education, quality of education,
housing, etc.. There's a strong perception in china held by many Han that Hui have benefited very
much from this growth, in in particular, what's called the "preferential policies" - the Youhui Zhengce 优惠政策
This is a system that gives benefits to minorities, particularly in the areas of education and
employment, based upon their minority status. In recent years there's been a major debate in China
about these policies, dividing uh groups into uh one of several camps. On the one hand, there's the
Ziyoupai 自由派 - the freedom party, the liberty party, people like Ma Rong who want to dismantle
the system as they believe it's almost been too successful in generating a kind of hyper-ethnic
consciousness. So people identify ethnically, rather than nationally, rather than Chinese,
and that's perceived as a problem by some. On the other hand there is the Zuopai 左派 - the leftists who
want to perfect this system. This debate may sound familiar, it has parallels with the debate about
affirmative action in the US. And so Han Chinese many Han Chinese are saying enough is enough, no
more preferential policies for minorities. With a replication of a halal symbol on almost everything,
some have argued it loses its meaning. And and this becomes a legal question. Food is regulated by law
to behold standards of production, marketing and transportation. Currently there is a kind of loose
system in place to regulate halal food production and even Qingzhen, halal restaurants in China.
The bureau of religious affairs, which is in charge of all matters of religion in China,
and the China Islamic Association, which is a kind of quasi-governmental organization that
links the the party to the Muslim masses, are in charge of licensing, registering, and doing
inspection visits, in places like halal factories and in halal restaurants. But almost everyone I
spoke to about this question has said that it's flawed, riddled with inconsistencies, favoritism,
clientelism, and corruption. Often one hears that licenses are approved without inspection,
or there's the problem where Han and Hui will enter into a kind of joint venture, but really it's
the the Han who's pushing the business enterprise, the Hui is basically absent, and this is perceived
as a violation of sharia by pious Muslims in China. These business enterprises then are formed through
the min jian - through these these engagements, these conversations with the authorities.
This could be a downside of the min jian, that is coordinated efforts, that that bend the law. Okay
moving on to to the analysis. I would agree with Gladney that Qingzhen is a kind of identity symbol.
Yet, at its core, it is a taboo. Specifically against pork, which Hui see as the food of the Han.
As a taboo, it has, as Mary Douglas pointed out, dimensions of both danger and pollution.
There's a real fear amongst Hui that they may consume non-halal products and in so doing
that would lead to bodily and spiritual pollution, but also erase this boundary between the Hui
and the Han. The predicament here is that, while Han can become Hui through conversion, and this is
just starting to happen - we just start to see more Han converting to Islam, very small numbers -
while that trajectory can happen, a Hui cannot become a Han - that would be apostasy, the great
sin of Islam. In China, this is understood in ethnic terms, so becoming Han - Han Hua 汉化.
So the prohibition against marrying out, uh women parallels in some way this pork prohibition. This
is the idea that uh Hui women cannot marry Han men - this is another min jian rule, this is a rule
that is upheld by the community of Muslims, not by the states, clearly okay. So the regulation of food
and sex are at the core of Hui law. Anthropologists, of course, have long written about the incest taboo,
often in terms of a rule of exclusion. Durkheim and his somewhat maligned "Incest; the nature and
origin of taboo" of 1963, traced all taboo to rules of exogamy, right. This is perhaps overstated. But
for Hui, again for Hui, it's not so much about exclusion, although they do exclude a certain
set of kin relations, but it's about excluding the uh the Han ethnic group. So it's more about
and, you can think about as, including uh the Hui in in marriage exchanges. Um the basic idea still
stands, that localized sharia is a reflection of the social - this is kind of Durkheim's
insight as applied to this case. Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his 1969 "The Elementary Structures of Kinship", wrote
about, incest wrote about incest taboo, viewing it less as a rule of negation - what one cannot
do - and more as one of reproducing society - what one must do - to continue social relations.
Freud in his 1913 "Totem and Taboo:, which is probably a more maligned work than Durkheim's work on
incest, more than anyone else, linked the taboo of eating a certain class of animal with exogamy, in
his notion of the origin of society - he took this idea from from Darwin that there was this primal
horde of brothers that killed the father, in that act they instituted society, they founded society
and then commemorated their victory/crime with a feast of the totem animal.
For Hui, eating together, marrying one another, these are expressions of their own minority position,
vis-a-vis the Han majority that are 92 percent of China's 1.35 billion people. Velario Valeri in his
2000 "The forest of taboos" - posthumous work- tries to harmonize the sociological structural traditions
of taboo, those of Durkheim and Douglas, with other traditions for, namely, the psychoanalytic, those of
Freud and Christeva, by arguing that the taboo is centrally about the integrity of the subject.
The question then becomes what happens following the deep marketization of Chinese society to the
relationship between the taboo and the subject - the Qingzhen and the Hui - when the latter can
no longer control the authenticity of the former, and thus itself. This has led to a kind of crisis
of Hui. These are some other images of Qingzhen that are more problematic, if the other ones were
problematic. On the left is an image from uh Ritan Gongyuan, Ritzan Square in Beijing. This
is a popular area. This is a restaurant owned and operated by Han yet nevertheless they have the
Qingzhen sign. The middle image is during a flight from Lanzhou to Beijing. I enjoyed some
halal food on board, um which was wonderful, you can see the the Qingzhen sign on the far right, but in
the middle - I don't know if you can see it - but there's a barrel of rum. Also in the image which
demonstrates a sort of cognitive dissonance in terms of how these relate to each other. And third
and most problematic, uh in Yinchuan I came across a street of Qingzhen bars - so halal bars - they're
serving halal beer. So the this brings us to the the current crisis all right.
The key question is: in the accelerated modernization of Chinese society, the state
has increasingly encroached on the ability of non-state authority - the family lineage, temple,
associations, the church, mosque, etc. - to regulate its community. So in the transition from this family,
a model to the state, the question for Hui is: how to make the taboo legible to
the state and the multi-ethnic population, so that the state maintains the boundaries.
In short: how do you turn a taboo into a law? So i just want to pause and reflect a little
bit about this distinction between taboo and and law. So taking Durkheim's symbolic approach,
taboo, he wrote, is not just a technique, but in fact a law, kind of metal law; Valeri writes that it's the
taboo is a prohibition of absolute character, with reference to religious sanctions and
not merely legal ones. So one puts taboo lower than the law and another puts taboo above the
law. Both deal with classification schemes - what is permissible and what is prohibited, or intolerable.
The difference is whether those schemes are backed by the authority of religion or that of the state.
Since 2002 Hui have been calling for a Qingzhen Shi Pin Guan Li Fa 清真食品管理法, a halal food administrative
law, to better monitor halal food production in the country. Most so-called autonomous regions, so for
Muslims, that's the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, have
their own regulation on this question, and beyond the autonomous regions, there are
autonomous prefectures and cities, they also have similar regulations as do even non-autonomous
areas, for example, Guangzhou and Shanghai. So there are dozens of these administrative regulations
that exist in China okay, it's not state law, it's below state law - it's administrative regulation.
But Hui have argued that this is not enough: they see a failure of enforcement and this is
long the critique of Chinese law right, it exists in the books but it's not enforced
in practice. So every year since 2002 the Hui groups have mobilized various political bodies,
namely, the Zheng Xie 政协 - the CPPCC - and local people's congresses to pass up a Ti'an - a proposal -
to advocate for legislation along these lines. There's a little bit of irony here
in that, the state generally encourages this sort of behavior - the state wants to see
people engaging state institutions constructively, right. The rub for Hui is that they have to walk
a line between using official discourse, and making their case, and advocating a place for
sharia. So when I was in China this summer, this was uh the topic on everybody's everybody's minds,
everybody, at the tip of everybody's tongues. I came across two examples of these proposals, of people
people had written to various state institutions to advocate for
halal food regulations. So I wanted to draw these to your attention. Uh the first is written by
the Linxia Prefecture CPPCC written in 2011. The title here is
"Proposed Plan for Speeding Up the Legislation of the Halal Food Management Regulations." I've
included a few excerpts here that I want to draw your attention to, and I quote "the normalization
and legalization of halal food management implements the plan of ruling the country
according to law." Ruling the country according to law: this is a this is a catch phrase in China, this
is an official kind of slogan uh - yi fa zhi guo 依法治国. Next, "halal dietary habits - the Qingzhen Yin Shi Xi guan 清真饮食习惯 -
are the commonly followed customs of all those who believe in islam the world over." Here, using
the term "custom" (xi guan 习惯), rather than law, okay, so this is the state approach, this is the state
discourse. And there's a number of recommendations and here's where things get kind of interesting. So
we have you know continue the legislative process, keep on going, full stream ahead,
increase the administration, enact the regulations according to the constitution, so explicitly citing
the constitution, again, this is what the state wants, the state wants an argument like this.
Confirm the basic principles of legislation and base the proposed legislation on the legitimate
principles of halal food, to clarify, that is, the principle of halal - lawful - "halal's
legitimacy rests on the basic rules of Islam's main scripture the Quran. Halal food is made in
accordance with those Islamic beliefs as commonly held by Muslims as enshrined in Islamic law - Islam Jiaofa 教法."
So here, we were moving off the scripts a little bit, off the official script. We're citing scripture
in arguing for a state law and, beyond that, we're using, if I can use the term a "taboo concept", which
would be Islamic law - the Chinese translation Yi Si Lan Jiaofa 伊斯兰教法. Moreover, not even that, but
the recommendation to revise PRC criminal law to include, impose criminal responsibility on
those who commit the unlawful behavior of for the purpose of obtaining illegal interests, using food
that is taboo to Muslims, in so-called "Muslim food", and thereby harm social stability and danger unity.
So arguing for criminal responsibility or liability for those who are violating this taboo,
okay, include that in the criminal law, as you're revising the criminal law, the
criminal law has gone over gone through a series of amendments over the years.
So this is an argument to further revise it include it with this language.
So that's the first example next there's uh an influential Yihewani - a Muslim brotherhood - cleric in
the CPPCC - there's an extra C there, it should be P - uh who is based in Xining and he wrote a Ti'an 提案 -
proposal - ensuring halal food safety, protect ethic unity and harmony. So you can see the effort to
couch it in a kind of state-acceptable frame. Halal food safety is, he wrote, the center of the center
of the entire nation's food safety, as you probably know, over the last couple years
China has been suffering a number of with a number of scandals in terms of contaminated toothpaste,
uh baby milk powder, etc., so this is an ongoing debate that people are having beyond the question
of religion. So tying it into that question, right, which the authorities they want to tackle that, so
bridging that divide, including religious law and a larger conversation about food safety and quality.
In recent years people take dietary customs - the yin shi xi su 饮食习俗 - that would be a Marxist-Leninist term for
law, as the basis for our ethnic law, as a basis for halal food, but that's a mistake,
the cleric says, the basis is the Quran, which specifies that food must be "lawful",
meeting in accordance with the rules of "Islamic law", again yi si lan jiaofa 伊斯兰教法. So
here the cleric is actually correcting that use of the official speak, in saying that, no actually
it is Islamic law. So remember, this is all in the proposal. Halal food safety is a basic factor for
the ethnic unity and social stability of the entire nation; something that the leadership, the
central government, certainly uh is seeking. Halal food safety maintains the entirety of the new silk
road economic belt - this is the massive initiative begun by Xi Jinping to link China with Central
Asia, the Middle East, in Southeast Asia by building infrastructural ties and outbound investment -
and includes a series of recommendations perfect that system uh recommend a system for each
municipality to regulate halal food certification, and uh and also make that regulation more robust
in terms of the enforcement by the China Islamic association and include the clerics in the process.
Okay. In the language language of these two examples, we can see a pushing of the envelope
between what is accepted, or acceptable, ethic minorities customs and habits, rule the country
according to law, new silk road economic belt, and what is based on sharia and the terminology of
sharia. Interestingly in my interviews with both the authors of these proposals, they said they did
not use language of Islamic law in their Ti'an proposals, and only ethnic customs - the language
of the state - but the texts prove otherwise. The proposals try to explain the urgent need for
the state to enforce their taboo. The proposals do so in the language of law and official done
with minimal reference to scripture and sacred law.
You see a trying to use permissible language while expanding it, including the impermissible.
Both proposals are attempts to insert classification schemes based upon sharia
into the larger scheme of PRC state law, and the proposals don't necessarily see a conflict in
doing so. In her study of religious freedom in the US, legal historian Sarah Gordon, in her book "The
Spirit of the Law", wrote how groups like the nation of Islam and the Jehovah's witnesses historically
argued for a kind of popular constitutionalism, to increase state protection of their forms
of religious belief. The idea here is that, the constitution can also support arguments that are
outside the mainstream of perceptions, of what's acceptable religion. She writes "the spirit
of the law, the glorious promises of the religion clauses - the first amendment - must shield them from
oppression, they argued. Their understanding of religious freedom was not shackled to dry
technical limitations; instead, they knew that the constitution shielded them." Contemporary
China clearly is not mid 20th century America. The PRC constitution has not played the same kind of
social restructuring role that it had that the US constitution has in our own history. Yet what
struck me in my conversations with Hui on these questions was that they also believed in the law.
Law has become, among some, what Peking University law professor (unintelligible) once wrote
a public belief - gong zhong de xin yang 公众的信仰.
There's a large literature in China studies concerning rights mobilization and
writes talk, for example, O'Brien and Lee, and others. Uh what's happening here is similar use of legal
language for utilitarian means, but it it's more than that. There is a belief in law, a belief
in the transcendent possibilities of the law and its promise of justice.
Even if the party does not subsume itself to law, then the faithful citizens would believe that to
be possible. Unlike a mystery of litigation law or constitutional review, halal food legislation
does not directly challenge the hegemony of the party, and yet indirectly, there is a challenge,
by suggesting an authority alternative to that of socialist law, that is sharia. This alternative
authority has its own classification scheme - its own rules, its own enforcement mechanisms -
the cleric, in his proposal, wrote "as Muslim masses who believe in the Quran, you should stand
on the high altitude of your belief and increase your self-discipline; do not partake in the sale of
non-halal foods". So self-discipline, according to Islamic law and ethics,
has the potential to arouse the party's fears of its own obsolescence, of its inability to
secularize religion monopolize the category of law and maintain the boundaries that cohere the nation.
Back to the spread of halal. The appeal to law was heard during the March in April uh two meetings -
the Lianghui - between the National People's Congress and the CPPCC. Like the previous 14
years, the draft of this legislation went up to the state council, but it was taken off the table.
There were fears of Uyghur terrorists; even Hui now joining ISIS and Syria becoming radicalized,
Wang Zhengwei, uh the so-called "imam" of the party, a Hui from Ningxia, who was the head of the
state ethnic affairs commission, was taken out of power, replaced by a member of the ziyoupai 自由派
Ju Weiqun, who is seeking to modify ethnic policies. In July of this year when I was in Shanghai, there
was a major incident where Hui attacked a recently opened halal beef noodle shop, citing violation of
the "400 meter rule." This is the idea that a new halal store cannot open 400 meters from
a pre-existing halal food shop. This is a minjian rule; this is nowhere in state law, it's not in any
state administrative regulation. It's a rule that the Hui themselves follow, and they have according
to them, for centuries. Um hundreds protested over several days. Uh the sign was taken down -
the Qingzhen sign on the far left was taken down, as were the two characters uh niurou, um but the
store was allowed to stay in business. The shop was still open for business.
One article that spread on Weibo, so the this is part of a large discussion about
whether or not the Hui have benefited too much from the policies, whether or not they have their
own system, their parallel system, the state law the fact that they're enforcing that system raised
a number of red flags for concerned citizens. On Weibo, there was uh one article that's been
very popular uh that argued that by the year 2078, China will become a majority Muslim state,
arguing that already this the state the official census has deflated the number of muslims and
goes through a number of statistical gymnastics to demonstrate that this is the case.
A scholar of Marxist thought formerly at CASS, the Chinese academy of social sciences,
Xi Wu, has written on her Weibo account that the spread of halal is a sign of the Islamization
of Chinese society and government. Her posts have attracted a strong following about 37,000 people,
with comments that regularly call for Chinese Muslims to "go back to the middle east."
Netizens vocalize a fear that for the PRC government to legislate a law to regulate Islam
or a law in accordance with sharia would blur the separation of church and state the zheng jiao fen li,
as held in the PRC constitution. for all these reasons the halal food law
was stopped. rather than receiving what they asked for law legal protection, they were met with fear.
Qingzhen, or halal, originally a classification marker (unintelligible) for Hui to separate what was lawful from
what is dangerous has been turned by Han majority into a sign of terror. The greenification, the lu hua,
of China, it's become inverted and mapped onto the nation, that which was initially a crisis of Hui
has become a crisis of the integrity of the nation itself. The root of the fear of the spread of halal,
as with sharia creep, is that the state's secular boundaries are being erased, law of rationality is
being replaced, contaminated, infiltrated with the law of terror. Some concluding comments. I began
with an account of how Hui practiced their notion of sharia through the min jian. Those
institutions and norms that have not necessarily received the state's blessing; those people places
and things that are not registered or sanctioned by state law. So clerics, students, mosques, tombs,
prayer halls, publications, property transactions, and so forth. Yet the state is continually
accessing these resources. In return clerics and students can benefit from such contacts
and increase rather than lose reputation. The min jian should not be acquitted with illegal; rather
it is not yet having a basis in state law. There is a kind of potentiality that adheres in the min jian.
It's far from static: it's always on the move, adapting as Chinese society
evolves in Islam, rather than Islam evolving in China. Min jian and law are not mutually exclusive,
they are different modalities for muslim state interaction but ones that have the potential to
transform into one another. So the book is about the min jian, the min jian would be one door,
a door that Hui clerics and officials continue to use and to access. The spread of halal the incident
points to another door: the door towards Law with a capital L. That may not necessarily be a good thing.
Anthropologists such as Elizabeth Pavinelli and John Komarov have argued whether, via the so-called
cunning of recognition, or lawfare, that non-state forms of legality are repugnant to modern
state law. Sally Engle Mary in her colonial history of Hawai, argues that by adapting the language of
sovereignty, the rule of law, uh has merely bound uh native Hawaiians into a secular legal system,
that has since constrained them rather than led to their liberation. The minjian rather
is the opposite of assuming a formal position or adopting official speak. It's that as that which
delimits and subjugates just as much as it grants rights. Min jian points to inter-ethnic equilibrium,
a kind of homeostasis that is made possible by its occurring on the backstage under the table,
or in the cramped offices of clerics or individual stalls, or halal restaurants, where the public eye
cannot go. Their participants shed themselves of much of their ideological commitments, whether
Communism or Islamicism, and get down to the pragmatics of local governance. Thank you.