China and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law, Matthew S. Erie

The Engels and Moustafa did not say much about whether they had encoun­tered hostility or rejection when they were contacting potential interviewees or obtaining written records.

To understand the dynamics of the localization and revitalization of Islamic law, in 2004 I began examining potential field sites during preliminary fieldwork. From 2009 to 20rr I conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in Northwest China, with follow-up fieldtrips in 20r2 and 20r5, for a total of twenty months in the field. Against the backdrop of heightened disquiet in the region after the July 2009 riots in Urumqi, a foreign researcher was a liability to any potential local sponsor. The competitive advantage of anthropology is “being there.” Yet being there can also be the worst of things - for one's interlocutors and for oneself. As a matter of pragmatics, one learns in China that there is the official way and the unofficial way to do things. I spent a great amount of time, effort, and funds trying the former. Eventually, I realized that not only was the latter preferred by most Chinese (Han or minority), but it would also allow me a window into those practices that occur beyond the pale of formal law.

Given the extreme difficulty of conducting field research in the shadow of the Urumqi riots, my fate was determined by a gathering of three individuals - a police officer, a local legislator, and a scholar (all Hui) - during a meeting in Linxia to which I was not invited. Because two of the three people in the room were my allies, I was allowed to stay. I developed a complex relationship of mutual irritation/tolerance with the third participant at the meeting, a police officer I will name Officer Zeng. After the meeting, we became beeping red dots on each other's radars. When passing me on the street, Officer Zeng would pretend to ignore me as he wrestled control over the involuntary snarl that would appear on his face. When ignoring each other became untenable and we engaged in conversation, for instance in a public park, we would inevitably start arguing through forced smiles as we found ourselves defending our respective countries' views on social justice. He would stop by unannounced at my place of residence to “check in” with me as he casually fingered through the books on my desk. We eventually settled into a kind of uneasy equilibrium. I became both his daughter's English tutor and conveni­ent dinner table scapegoat for US foreign policy gaffes, as we participated in the exchange of favors and verbal barbs. He advised me that “Linxia is not like other places” and “I should be careful.” I initially dismissed such warnings as Chinese paternalism, but after experiencing subtle shades of hostility that once flared up into face-to-face confrontation, I can reflect that Officer Zeng was correct.

In short, our relationship was confounding and yet, over time, became familiar. Although my status was never clearly defined in legal terms, it was only because of our relationship (however ambivalent it was) that I was allowed to conduct my research. Thus, my fieldwork was directed by some of the same forces that shape the minjian in China as experienced by Hui: on the one hand, constraints, if not blockages, imposed by state law and policy and, on the other hand, the obligations of personal and communal (in my case, anthropologists') ethical and professional commitments.

I established myself in the old Muslim quarter of the city known as Bafang. I realized that given the importance of the teaching schools to the localization of Islamic law in China, I would have to conduct visits to other field sites in the Northwest. I visited additional areas in Gansu, including Dongxiang Autonomous County, home of the Dongxiang, and the Hui-Han-Tibetan town of Lintan (formerly Taozhou), the base of the Xidaotang. In Qinghai I traveled to Xunhua Salar Autonomous County, the seat of the Salars, and also to the great Hui center of Xining. I took overnight trains with Hui students to Ningxia, visiting Guyuan and Haiyuan, places of extremely low socio­economic levels but centers of Hui, particularly Khufiyya Sufi, communities. I also took several trips to Yinchuan, the capital of the autonomous region and the city that is perhaps the most flourishing in the contemporary Islamic revival. Since 2004 I have taken half a dozen trips to Xinjiang, ranging from two to four weeks in length. These research trips entailed data collection in Hami (Kumul), Urumqi, and oasis cities around the Taklamakan Desert, including Kashgar and Shache (Yarkand). My approach was thus a modified multi-sited ethnographic study.

Though my study was heavily focused on Linxia, my collection of data gathering radiated outward, following missionaries, circulating texts, and Sufi pilgrimage routes. Such an approach enabled me to obtain a depth of knowledge in the “intensively-focused-upon single site of ethnographic obser­vation and participation” while recognizing that China's Little Mecca is located in larger “wholes.” Plural sites enabled me to compare a number of variables across the Northwest, including the effects of the Islamic law revival and the impacts of Communist policy on Hui communities.

The bulk of the data analyzed in this book comes from more than two hundred interviews.

The core data set of my study comes from time spent at thirty-four mosques and the twenty-three main Sufi tomb complexes in Linxia. Mosques (and also schools, Islamic banks, and sheep hide markets) are arenas in which Hui make sense of their adherence to state law and Islamic law, the site where the Hui social field is most visible. Interviews were conducted principally in Mandarin. The local dialect is called Bafanghua, “the language of Bafang.” Bafanghua incorporates Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Tibetan, Mongolian, and various other local dialects of Muslim ethnicities, including Dongxiangyu and Salarhua. I studied Arabic, one of the main foreign languages in Bafanghua, in Linxia and, in between field trips, in Amman, Jordan, so as my ability in the dialect increased, I was able to introduce more Bafanghua into my conversations. Interviews were semistructured, and wherever possible, more informal interviews were conducted as follow-up. To develop extended case studies, I selected several influential clerics, as defined by their leadership at “administrative mosques” (hanyi dasi, or hanyisi) or at Sufi tombs where founders of orders are buried. Given the sensitivity of the topic of Islamic law in China, I did not record conversations but took copious notes during interviews, which I immediately afterward transcribed in full. I kept these transcripts in a double-password-protected laptop that I carried with me wherever I went.

In addition to interviews, I observed and, where permitted by Hui, partici­pated in all aspects of devotional and social life. These included prayer, ritual feasting and holidays, charitable giving, and attendance at weddings and funerals. I also collected case studies of dispute resolution in a variety of forums, such as informal mediation by clerics in mosque offices and more formalized mediation jointly conducted by clerics and police. On-site data collection was supplemented by participation in Chinese Muslim online networks, blogs, and virtual communities that produce and consume matters of Islamic law.

In compliance with professional ethics, I safeguarded information entrusted to me. Furthermore, even if I was not entering into lawyer-client relationships with related privileges, my training as a lawyer instructed me to protect infor­mation. This was not always easy, given that Hui learned of my research through their networks (and on social media platforms where Hui discussed me and my intentions often quite erroneously) and sometimes knew to whom I had been speaking. In addition, I collected local histories of teaching schools, and I sometimes participated in their writing when asked to do so.

In addition to fieldwork, I conducted research in governmental archives in Linxia and Urumqi as well as the Gansu Provincial Archives in Lanzhou, which also contain material for Ningxia and Qinghai. I also conducted archival research at the Northwest Minority Research Center Materials Room at Lanzhou University, the National Library in Beijing, and the University Services Center at the City University of Hong Kong - as well as the Harvard-Yenching Library at Harvard University, which has the finest collection of Christian missionary material from those families who visited Linxia in the tumultuous 1920s and 1930s.

While Erie, Moustafa, and the Engels were interested in court decisions (though these were scarcer in Erie's case), they did not devote their attention entirely to the judiciary. However, as we saw in Chapter 7, court-related studies are a significant aspect of Asian law and society research. Some Asian law and society scholars go to courthouses and courtrooms to study the activities and norms related to judges and other people associated with the judiciary, with the aim of illuminating the workings of legal power or state power more broadly.

Rahela Khorakiwala's ethnography of the High Court of Madras (Courts, Chapter 7) is an innovative example. Her Madras article comes from her larger study of the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras (Khorakiwala 2020) in which she treats “law as visual field” to examine law's ocular representations to understand how formal legal actors of these Indian courts practiced the law and how they imagined what the law was and should be: “The avenues of analysis are not restricted only to the outwardly visual, but also to the visual that is controlled in forms of restrictions on photography and video-recording in and of courts that speaks of, to borrow from Robert Cover, the �jurispathic' tendency of the law to violently control competing images that challenge its legitimacy” (Khorakiwala 2020:3). To that end, Khorakiwala observed court proceedings in the three High Courts; interviewed judges, solicitors, lawyers, court clerks and other court staff, secretaries, peons, jour­nalists, professors, and gown-makers for judges; and gathered records on court architecture and procedure, manuals of the High Courts, autobiographies, judgments, and newspaper articles.

Even though courthouses are usually open to the public, Khorakiwala and other researchers ran into obstacles when they tried to enter these buildings without being on any official court business. Sometimes they were not allowed to observe proceedings in what was supposedly an open court. When carrying out their fieldwork on grassroots courts in China, Ng and He (2017:206) (Courts, Chapter 7) were given access to courtrooms only because of their personal connections:

Even with collegial introductions, there were visible differences in the degree of easiness that judges displayed toward us. There were occasions where we were, for example, told not to take any notes inside the courtroom. [...] In all cases, we were mindful of the possibility that our observations of the judges and their trials could possibly be affected by our connections [...] To address the problem of the intervening effects of our presence, we did two things. We stayed for as long as we could in courts to which we were given access. After the first few days, we found that the judges we observed became more relaxed as they became accustomed to our presence. They reverted back to their routine practices and habits. We also deliberately walked into courtrooms presided over by judges to whom we were not introduced. We observed those trials as strangers. This served as a kind of “control” for us. Observations of this type offered a good way to corroborate our observations. Obviously, without a collegial introduction, our showing up at some trials became a more precarious event. In some cases, we were asked to identify who we were and then we were asked to leave... [O]ne trick of avoiding being kicked out by a judge was to slip into the courtroom only after a trial had commenced. Once a trial had com­menced, the judge would be busy dealing with litigants. This minimized the possibility that a judge would ask us (sitting at the back) questions.

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