The Hui Muslims’ Identity Negotiations: A Socio-Legal Investigation into the Relations between the Sharīʿa and the Chinese Legal Systems

This dissertation is a historical investigation into the relations between the Sharīʿa and the pre-communist Chinese legal systems, and it asks how these two normative traditions contribute to the construction of the Chinese Hui Muslims’ dual-identity of being Muslim and Chinese. It aims to explore what are the possible major causes of the tensions for the Hui Muslims to become Chinese without losing their Muslim identification both in the imperial and modern Chinese socio-legal contexts before 1949. In this regard, the thesis also provides three case studies on Ḥajj, education, and marriage that cover the religious, moral, and legal aspects of the Sharīʿa so as to examine how the tensions are presented, negotiated, and tackled by the Hui Muslims since Islam came to China, particularly during the Republican period. As a historical examination on the socio-political process of the construction of the Hui Muslims’ dual-identity, the dissertation analyzes a range of historical Chinese texts through the insights of hermeneutics, including, but not limited to, imperial Chinese legal documents, classical Chinese Confucian works, and various texts produced by the Hui Muslims themselves. This is also complemented by my short-term fieldwork studies in several Muslim communities in the western and southwestern parts of China.