Matthew S. Erie, a trained lawyer and
ethnographer who teaches at Oxford University,
lived for two years in Linxia, a small city in the northwestern Chinese
province of Gansu. Known as China’s Mecca, it is a center of religious life for
the Hui, an ethnic minority numbering 10 million who practice Islam. Along with
the Turkic Uighurs, they are one of 10 officially
recognized ethnic groups that practice Islam, making the total population of
Muslims in China around 23 million, according to the 2010 government census.
Mr. Erie’s recently published book, “China
and Islam: The Prophet, the Party, and Law,” is a
look at how Shariah
— Islamic law and ethics — is implemented among the Hui. In an interview
he discussed his findings, which confound many preconceptions about Shariah,
Chinese law and the rigidity of the Communist state.
How
should we understand the statistics on Muslims in China? Officially there are
23 million, but this assumes that Islam is an ethnicity, and that all Hui, or
all Uighurs, must be Muslim.
It’s a problematic issue because it’s an
ethnic category that is used to define members of a religion. Hence, it can be
both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. For the former, Muslims outside of
China may not consider every Hui to be a Muslim. Many Hui are very pious. They
attend mosque regularly and go to the hajj. And then there
are people who say they’re Hui, meaning they just don’t eat pork. For the
latter, it’s possible that some Chinese citizens who
are ethnically Han [the dominant ethnic group in China] or Tibetan are, in
fact, Muslims. It’s a very loose category.
