MATTHEW S.

ERIE
University of Oxford

Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy

in Muslim China:
Gift giving in a plural world

A B S T R A C T he Chinese Muslim (Hui) female bank manager I was speaking

T
In Marcel Mauss’s analysis, the gift exists in the context
with looked exasperated. It was a year after the worst incident of
of a homogenous system of values. But in fact, different
types of normative systems can inhabit the same social interethnic violence in contemporary Chinese history: the riots
field. This is the case among Hui, the largest Muslim between Han Chinese and Uyghurs (Turkic Muslims) that took
minority group in China, for whom the “freedom” of the place July 5, 2009, in the far-western territory of China called the
gift resides in the giver’s capacity to follow the rules Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (or Xinjiang for short). I was visiting
underlying gifting, in this case, the rules of sharia. I
the headquarters of the Bank of Ningxia (BON) in Yinchuan, the capital of
call this capacity “minjian (unofficial, popular)
autonomy.” Hui follow sharia in pursuit of a good life, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (or Ningxia for short), east of Xinjiang,
but their practices are also informed by mainstream to learn more about BON’s new Islamic banking services, which were one
Han Chinese gift practices and by the anxieties of the sign among many of an Islamic revival in China. The bank manager’s ex-
security state. In their gifting practices, Hui thus asperation resulted partly from the state’s suffocation of Islamic finance
endeavor to reconcile the demands of Islamic,
services—a roadblock I had come to expect during my research in north-
postsocialist, and gift economies. [gift economy,
autonomy, sharia, charity, China, Islamic finance, ethics] west China during a period of anti-Uyghur hysteria, China’s version of
Islamophobia. It also resulted from Hui customers’ tepid reception of Is-
·,  lamic finance. The two problems, constrained supply and insufficient de-
, 
mand, were related.

-,   " “We began by publicizing the banking services in mosques and gave out
" , flyers and even free gifts to Hui to entice customers, but the products are
, “” ()  not competitive, and interest has not been what we had hoped for,” the
 “” (, )  bank manager told me, her shoulders sagging. “The government is afraid
, “”, 
Uyghurs will use the bank in Yinchuan. This is why such a bank will not

“”, ,  open in Urumqi [the capital of Xinjiang]—for fear that it will increase finan-
 cial ties between Muslims in Xinjiang and Central Asia,” she said. During a
[, , “”, later meeting, she admitted that even after three years the project was still
, , , ] in the “testing phase.” While some progress had been made in attracting
‫ﺍ‬ . ّ ‫ﺍ‬ customers to savings accounts for the hajj (about 50,000 yuan, or $7,320
‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﻫ‬. ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺃﻥ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ on average), the bank’s relatively unused service windows bearing the sign
‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ " " ّ‫" ﺃﻥ‬ "
Islamic Finance Service (Chinese: Yisilan jinrong fuwu) were evidence that
‫ﺍ‬ )" " ‫ﻫ‬ . ‫ﻫ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ّ ‫ﺃ‬
‫ﻱ‬
‫ﺍ‬ ‫ ﺍ‬. ‫(ﺍ‬
Hui were not clamoring for such banking products.1 As a consequence, the
. ‫ﺃ‬ ‫ﻭ‬ " ‫ﺍ‬ " ّ BON’s Islamic finance service department had shrunk from six employees
. ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺇ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ to four between my visits, two years apart.
The bank manager’s frustrations reveal some of the tensions between
‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺍ‬ ‫ﺍ‬
religious revival and state control in postsocialist China—and the cen-
trality of sharia, with its own contradictions, in China’s Islamic renais-
sance. Before explaining these tensions, I define terms. I use the analytic

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 1–14, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12307

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American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 2 May 2016
term postsocialist to refer to China’s combination of priva-
tization and state control of the economy, and the political
term socialist to refer to state institutions. Muslims through-
out the world, including China, believe that sharia, liter-
ally “the path,” provides ethical guidance for living a good
life (see Koran 45:18). Sharia refers to the rules of God’s
revelation: the Koran and the sunna (the practice of the
Prophet Muhammad, including the hadith [reports] of his
deeds) and has sometimes been translated as “Islamic law,”
which is largely a Western imposition. Yet because deriving
and applying rules from the independent sources has re-
quired the elaboration of a complex body of jurisprudence,
sharia includes not only ethical prescriptions but also legal
rules (Clarke 2012). Sharia has mostly been studied in Mid-
dle Eastern contexts, where rules of sharia may be codified
into modern legislation, that is, transformed into justiciable
rights (Lombardi 2006; Rabb 2008). Muslims also live un-
der sharia in western European democratic states (Bowen
2007, 2011), where it does not have official status but where
flexible legal frameworks and a robust civil society support
Muslim minorities’ ability to live according to it, along with
state law.
In recent years, inspired by the “virtue ethics” of moral
philosophers from Aristotle to Alasdair MacIntyre, as well
as the later writings of Michel Foucault, the “new” anthro-
pology of Islam has suggested that sharia provides a ba-
sis for ethical self-fashioning through textual production
and embodied practices (Agrama 2012; Asad 1993, 2006;
Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2003). Such studies dovetail
with those of anthropologists of ethics who disagree with
the conception of law or morality as rules imposed from
the outside; rather, they assert that individuals use ethics
to better themselves through reflection and action, some-
times with a teleological end in mind (Fassin 2012; Faubion
2011; Keane 2007, 2014; Laidlaw 2014; Lambek 2010). Such
studies, however, share the assumption that ethical sub-
jects have the resources through which to conduct such
work.
China provides a test case for these converging
paradigms: the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a single-
party state that does not officially recognize religious law,
including sharia. State law remains the law of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), and civil society, as with other re-
sources, is only nascent. Sharia is what the Chinese (Han
and Hui) refer to as minjian, a term meaning “unoffi-
cial” or “popular” that is applied to practices outside the
state. Within the larger discursive framework of minjian,
Hui call sharia jiaofa, “law of the teaching” or “religious
law.” They abide by a localized form of sharia to work to-
ward their sense of the “good,” sometimes despite political
and legal structures that are ironically called in official dis-
course zizhi, meaning “self-rule” or “autonomy,” and that
are largely designed to deprive them of that capacity. Sharia,
however, provides a basis for a minjian form of autonomy.
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The initial impetus for the BON’s sharia-compliant fi-
nancial services came from the Hui business community in
Yinchuan. Like many public-service initiatives in China, it
was not a government project but rather a minjian project.
The state-owned BON began its pilot project to introduce
Islamic finance, one of the first such attempts in mainland
China, at the insistence of the community.2 After sending a
delegation to Malaysia to study its Islamic finance system,
the BON obtained governmental approval to offer sharia-
compliant services. These included no-interest savings ac-
counts, investment accounts, and joint ventures wherein a
customer and the BON enter into a contract of sale, and the
BON purchases goods on behalf of the customer for a profit.
According to the bank manager, the BON applied for
an initial investment of 200 million yuan ($29.2 million),
but the Ministry of Finance approved only a fraction of
that amount. Further, the government imposed caps on the
size of loans and deposits. Five years later, governmental
approval was still pending for no-interest “profit sharing”
accounts and other more sophisticated instruments that
would make Islamic finance truly profitable. By the end of
June 2012, the total balance of the savings accounts was
53 million yuan ($7.7 million), there were 222 joint-venture
projects, and the total amount generated was 1.34 billion
yuan ($196 million). Bank managers, however, claimed that
savings would be significantly larger when more advanced
instruments were approved.
Government controls, spurred on by anxiety over
Islamic radicalism and inadequate local support, led Hui
businesspeople to adopt minjian methods to create their
own links with overseas financial sources.3 After a conversa-
tion with the dispirited BON bank manager, I visited a Hui
businessman who glowed in describing a minjian charita-
ble organization he helped establish that channels money
from Kuwait for local charities in Ningxia. “The government
does not provide adequate funds to Hui communities,” he
said. “Banks like the BON do not have branches in the Mid-
dle East and so cannot attract foreign customers. We have
solved this problem.” His organization works with banks in
Kuwait to help Kuwaitis deposit money in interest-free sav-
ings accounts. The bank then issues non-interest-bearing
loans to charitable projects that his organization identifies
in Ningxia. The result is that Hui can circumvent official
blockages for cross-border transactions. “This is important,
as it complies with Islamic law,” the businessman added.
Whereas Muslims in North America (Maurer 2006) and
Southeast Asia (Rudnyckyj 2014) have adopted Islamic fi-
nance in secular markets, the future of Islamic finance
in China is uncertain. When the Chinese economy began
stagnating in 2015, Hui entrepreneurs in Ningxia, as well
as a number of stakeholders—including Malaysian banks,
Chinese securities firms, and even the PRC company that
owns Hainan airlines—all demanded Islamic banking as a
way of attracting Muslim investors. Nonetheless, since the
 Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China
2009 riots, the state’s public-security organs carefully mon-
itor contacts between Muslims in China and coreligion-
ists abroad; as a result, transnational trade and investment
have become suspect Muslim activities. In northwest China,
Hui communities are reviving not through market-based
financial instruments such as Islamic bonds, but through
minjian charitable transactions. In other words, Hui-led Is-
lamic revival is fueled in large part by the gift of charity,
yet because of sharia’s minjian status, gift circulation entails
subversion, anxiety, and sometimes antagonism for Hui.
An analysis of Hui charity extends Marcel Mauss’s
(1990) seminal analysis of the gift. Mauss’s key insight into
the paradox of the gift—that it both produces social ties and
is deeply self-serving in demanding a “return”—recognizes
the dynamic nature of gift giving. In Mauss’s examination,
however, the spirit of the gift assumes shared values be-
tween the giver and recipient. So while competing princi-
ples are involved in the exchange of gifts (e.g., rivalry and
consensus), these belong to the same value system. Thus,
while Mauss’s approach is dynamic, it is also, in a sense,
flat. Anthropologists since Mauss have shown that value
systems rarely exist in isolation; instead, a multiplicity of
norms shape behavior in any given “social field” (Bourdieu
1987, 805; Moore 1978; Sousa Santos 2002). Hui charity is
precisely a gift that characterizes a set of behaviors based
on exchange (i.e., a social field) that is defined by a plurality
of norms, such as sharia, customs, and state law and policy,
the last of which may obstruct the bottom-up emergence of
Islamic finance.
The multiple norms that inform Hui giving do not all
fall in the same category. As standards of behavior, norms
take the form of prescriptive or prohibitive rules that may
derive from state law, religious ethical-legal orders, or lo-
cal custom, a term with more currency in Islamic legal
studies than contemporary anthropology and which I de-
fine as routinized social practices that, in the Hui case,
are reproduced in Chinese society. Whereas the party-state
backs state law through its monopoly on force, Hui com-
munities “enforce” religious law and ethics through preach-
ing, proselytizing, moral suasion, producing didactic texts,
and exemplary behavior. Sharia is different still from local
Chinese customs that Hui have adapted from Han Chinese
usage, as I show below. Each source of values informs gift
giving. Hui charity thus exemplifies what James Laidlaw
has called “value pluralism” (2014, 166), which involves in-
consistent definitions of the “good.” An analysis of Hui gift
giving demonstrates that the legal, the religious, and the
customary constantly transform one another through ev-
eryday practice, specifically that of the minjian.
Hui charity highlights a particular conundrum in the
literature on gift giving, the so-called “free gift.” Anthro-
pologists since Mauss and Bronislaw Malinowski have
debated the idea of the “free gift,” which is unrecipro-
cated and not predicated on a “return” gift (Hann 2006;
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
 American Ethnologist
Malinowski 1926; Mauss 1990; Pitt-Rivers 2011; Strathern
1990; Venkatesan 2011). Theoretically, soteriological reli-
gions may provide an exception to the Maussian rule that
there are “no free gifts” (Douglas 1990). In practice, how-
ever, Hui, like alms providers elsewhere, may donate with
the expectation of returns from God, alleviation from suffer-
ing, or other grants of divine grace. I thus retain scare quotes
around the term “free gift.”
There is yet another dimension of reciprocity in Hui
charity, which is motivated not by guarantees of divine aid
but by positioning oneself in the social world. Specifically,
when Hui give to elevate their standing in their communi-
ties, they may do so more in line with Chinese convention
than Koranic prescriptions. Self-interest in Islamic charita-
ble gifting introduces ethical contradictions in intent and
practice (Isik 2014; Singer 2008, 8, 64, 223). For my purposes,
ethicized reflections (or the lack thereof ) are analytic win-
dows in reconsidering the “free” nature of such gifts. Hui
practice and descriptions of their practice contend that the
“free” nature of the gift may reside less in its alleged non-
reciprocity than in the performance of minjian obligations
that undergird such gifting.
Specifically, I examine the malleability of voluntary giv-
ing (C: nietie) in contemporary Hui communities through a
number of institutionalized practices.4 The flow of money
across northwest China and state borders is channeled not
just by Muslim piety but also by traditional Chinese ethics
and the state’s security interests. Despite or because of these
pressures, Hui efforts to finance their communities through
charity, a vital dimension of their sharia, constitute “min-
jian autonomy.” Hui social practices produce minjian au-
tonomy outside state authority just as such practices con-
tinually manage Hui relationships with the state and the
Han majority.
Gifting, often associated with reciprocity and relation-
ship building, would seem antithetical to autonomy. But
the Hui “free gift,” which undoubtedly has social effects,
is also central to their efforts to follow sharia. That Hui
charitable practices entail aspects of socialist governmen-
tality and non-Islamic rules for gifting does not inval-
idate Hui autonomy. Rather, Hui exercise autonomy by
working out tensions between the norms produced in
giving.
I explain minjian autonomy with reference to
20 months of ethnographic research conducted in Hui
communities in northwest China and along the east coast,
from 2009 to 2015. Through my fieldwork, I came to under-
stand how Hui fulfill their obligations under sharia in a so-
cialist legal system. Specifically, I conducted ethnographic
research in mosques and government offices and among
entrepreneurs. I apportioned my time among members of
different “teaching schools” (C: jiaopai), Hui communities
united by their particular doctrinal interpretations of
Islam, including the traditionalist Gedimu, mystical Sufis,
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 2 May 2016
modernist Yihewani, and neoconservative Salafiyya, to
understand their different experiences of autonomy.
Islamic revival and the (in)security state
Following the increasing prominence of political Islam in
the Chinese public sphere and global strains of Islamic ex-
tremism, the Chinese government’s policy toward Muslim
minority populations has shifted in recent years from inte-
gration to assimilation. According to the latest national cen-
sus (in 2010), China has about 23 million Muslims. Islam is
one of the fastest-growing religions among Chinese under
30, although its growth is due more to the state’s relaxation
of the one-child policy for Muslim minorities than to con-
version (Zhongguo renmin daxue zhexueyuan 2015). Begin-
ning in the 1950s, as part of its construction of a multieth-
nic state, China “identified” 55 ethnic minorities (shaoshu
minzu), 10 of which are Muslim (Gladney 1996). Hui are the
largest Muslim minority group, with a population of slightly
over 10 million, and Uyghurs are the second largest, with
slightly less than that number.5
The Communists have inherited from previous regimes
a complex set of polyethnic relationships on the north-
west borderlands. One response to the governance question
has been to install “regional ethnic autonomy” (C: minzu
quyu zizhi; hereinafter “ethnic autonomy”) in Xinjiang and
Ningxia, which are Uyghur and Hui areas, respectively. A
Soviet adaptation, ethnic autonomy entitles people’s gov-
ernments in these areas to adapt national legislation to local
circumstances and thus protect ethnic-minority language
and “customs,” understood under PRC law as dress, festi-
vals, and other tangible expressions of culture. From the
founding of the PRC to the present, however, no such au-
tonomous government at the highest administrative level of
an “autonomous region” has been able to implement such
legislation. Critics of ethnic autonomy have blamed the sys-
tem as a front for Communist oppression (e.g., Liu 2014).
The deterioration of minority-state relations has gal-
vanized international debates about ethnicity and religion
in China. Uyghurs rioted in 2009, as did Tibetans in March
2008. A number of Uyghurs, whom the state alleges to be
terrorists, have conducted attacks since 2009 in Xinjiang
and elsewhere in China. Fearing transnational terrorist net-
works, the party-state has implemented a crackdown in
Xinjiang: intensified surveillance, restrictions on prayer and
Islamic dress, and policies to encourage intermarriage be-
tween Uyghurs and Han. Hui mobility has also been ham-
pered by such restrictive measures. Regardless of ethnicity,
“Muslim” has become a suspect category.
While critics have opened up a much-needed debate
about the future of religious and ethnic minorities in China,
they often fail to consider the actual lived experiences of
Muslim minorities and their nonstate normative systems.
The Hui experience foregrounds the question of autonomy.
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
In the Western liberal tradition, political autonomy is dis-
tinguished from moral autonomy. The latter, according to
Immanuel Kant (2002), refers to one’s ability to impose
moral law on oneself, rather than having law imposed by
an external authority. Proponents of political autonomy aim
to design an institutional framework to recognize moral au-
tonomy not for the individual (Kant’s unit) but for a group,
as defined by ethnicity, religion, and so forth. Political au-
tonomy then means the institutionalization of rights that
protect freedom against interference by others (Dworkin
1988; Rawls 1980).
I borrow the basic distinction between moral and
political autonomy, without importing the substance of
autonomy from the liberal tradition, to think through
minjian autonomy from the Hui vantage point. The premise
of my argument is that minjian autonomy means the capac-
ity to follow one’s own rule, in this case, sharia. The study
of sharia requires the anthropologist to consider both in-
digenous and analytic views: among Hui, sharia is a matter
of personal conscience, a duty that derives from God yet is
also a system of rules enforced by the community of believ-
ers. Hence, in my formulation, the “one” is as communal as
it is individual. Despite the view of official policy that to be
ethnic is to be without one’s own rule, since Chinese social-
ism cannot tolerate legal orders different from the state’s,
Hui nonetheless practice a patchwork form of sharia that is
both grassroots and increasingly transnational.
Finance is a particularly important aspect of their prac-
tice. After three decades of the party-state’s uneven policies
toward Islam, including outright hostility during the Cul-
tural Revolution (1966–76), China initiated an “opening and
reform” in 1978. Economic development and marketization
led to religious liberalization. In the early 1980s, the party-
state provided some funds to reconstruct mosques. More
than three decades into the reforms, however, mosques are
now in need of repairs. Although subsidies from the central
government are a major component of ethnic autonomy,
funds are generally used for infrastructural projects, not re-
ligious institutions. Hui have had difficulty procuring inter-
national monies from the Muslim World League and the
Islamic Development Bank. While transnational Hui net-
works have reemerged in the reform period through the
hajj, Sufi pilgrimage, business ties, study-abroad programs,
and intellectual exchanges, the party-state has tried to curb
such networks to the (largely commercial) benefit of the
nation.
Financing the mosque community through
“free gifts”
Certainly, someone can lose face in regards to nietie.
This happens all the time. If two men are of the same
relative socioeconomic position, and one gives more
than the other, then the one who does not give as much
will lose face [diu mianzi] and must make up for it. The
 Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China
Figure 1. A placard inside a mosque in Linxia, China, showing the amounts of donations from individual members and families in 2009.
fact that all the nietie numbers are publicly displayed in
the mosque courtyard makes it hard for someone not to
lose face in this circumstance.
The young Hui government official explained to me
a central tension in the practice of charity while walking
down the main street of Linxia, which Hui call “China’s Lit-
tle Mecca,” because all teaching schools are concentrated
there. For the official, the Hui practice of nietie (Arabic:
niyyah), or voluntary donation, has been influenced by the
ethics of the Chinese gift economy. The result is that do-
nation may become an egoistic and self-interested activity,
violating the spirit of sharia. Nietie thus incorporates both
Islamic rules governing voluntary donation (A: sadaqa) and
Chinese customs of gifting. Hui adopt different strategies to
reconcile these conflicting demands in giving “free gifts,” as
one vehicle for minjian autonomy.
Hui depend on community members’ resources to fi-
nance mosques and Sufi tombs. To date, state law has
prohibited them from establishing charitable organizations
that could accept funds from overseas Muslims. The state
system, however, does permit Hui to donate to mosques as
“religious activity areas,” under their legal definition. Hui
finances come from membership of the mosque commu-
nity in one of three ways, including nietie, the obligatory za-
kat, an annual contribution of a specified percentage of an
individual’s income, and pious endowments, called wagefu
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 American Ethnologist
(A: waqfs, sing. waqf ).6 I concentrate on the first and third
as examples of localized sharia, the root of Hui autonomy.
Without income generated through nietie, Hui told me,
mosques could not function in China. Nearly every mosque
in the northwest has a placard in the central courtyard
on which the amounts that individual members or fami-
lies have donated are displayed (see Figure 1). Such signs
are also common in Taoist temples, although most Hui do
not entertain the comparison, for to do so would admit to
syncretism in their Islamic practice. In coming or going,
men will pass by this sign and give it a quick once-over or
linger before it, making mental notes of donors. Large do-
nations draw attention and comment. I overheard groups
of men discussing an individual’s wealth with a mix of envy,
admiration, and nostalgia for the equality of the Mao era.
Whereas some viewed individual success as a metric of
God’s grace, displays of wealth made others jealous of some
brothers’ ability to cultivate business ties overseas.
In conversations with members of mosque communi-
ties, I learned that nietie is the principal source of funds for
keeping up all physical property, office and cleaning sup-
plies, books for libraries and madrassas, teachers’ salaries,
the clerics’ maintenance, edibles for holidays, and all costs
for students, including their food, books, and supplies.
Many mosques have an accountant, who records dona-
tions (see Figure 2). Nietie spills over into all aspects of so-
cial life, beyond the institution of the mosque, and this is
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 2 May 2016
Figure 2. The accountant of a mosque in Lanzhou, China, recording
donations in 2009.
what sparked my interest in it. I saw the ubiquity of money
circulating during funerals, births, and weddings, where
family members and friends donated money to relatives of
the deceased, parents, or newlyweds. I also donated money,
partly as a way to repay communities who allowed me to
spend time among them, but also to understand the rules
of giving. When I offered money to a cleric, he would refuse
it outright, but when I said “nietie,” he would nod in accep-
tance, uttering “bismillah” (“in the name of God”).
Nietie is one way that Hui link their traditional prac-
tices to the building of the Chinese nation-state (Gillette
2000, 177). After disasters like the 2008 Wenchuan earth-
quake in Sichuan Province and the 2010 Yushu earthquake
in Qinghai Province, Hui communities collected nietie for
government-sponsored disaster relief. As Erica Bornstein
(2012) has documented in the case of India, the state has
tried to regulate charity to align giving that may derive
from religious obligations with nationalist aims of develop-
ment; or, in Hui terms, to render the minjian transparent.7
Through such public acts of charity, Hui reconcile the ethi-
cal obligations of sharia, as Muslims, with their duties to the
nation-state, as Chinese.
Giving and receiving nietie further links Hui to com-
munities of coreligionists beyond China. Whereas Hui
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
mobility and international travel have historically been lim-
ited for a host of reasons, cross-border circuits of nietie
connect Hui to the global umma. Increasingly, Hui en-
trepreneurs, such as the Ningxia businessman mentioned
above, secure overseas donations by taking advantage of
China’s relative openness to international business (as long
as it is not coded as “Islamic”). These range in purpose from
a private Islamic school in rural Ningxia, built by donations
from the Persian Gulf, to a halal products factory in south-
western Gansu with seed money from Sudanese business-
men, which employed Hui youth as Arabic translators.
Nietie, what could be called the linchpin of Hui finan-
cial and spiritual life or a “total social phenomenon” (Mauss
1990, 3), is based on conceptual slippage, evidencing the lo-
calization of Islam. The Arabic referent for nietie is niyyah,
which means “intent” or “intention” (Bourdieu 1977, 173).
The link between the religious and legal significance of
niyyah, according to Lawrence Rosen (1984), can be found
at the start of each prayer, when Muslims declare audibly
or mentally their intention as a specifically religious sign
that the act arises from the heart. Meanwhile, Rosen notes,
niyyah has also been a central legal concept in determining
the seriousness of an offense both in criminal contexts and
in civic affairs wherein intent is required to determine the
validity of a bequest or contract (1984, 49–52). In the origi-
nal Arabic, the term applies exclusively to the motivation or
volition behind gifting rather than the gift itself.
The Islamic legal basis of what Hui call nietie is sadaqa,
or voluntary charity. Sadaqa is understood in Islamic scrip-
ture as a meritorious and expiatory act (Singer 2008, 4,
18; Weir and Zysow 2012). As a scripturalist cleric told
me: “Giving alms leads to rewards from Allah in the after-
life.” One reason for the slippage between niyyah (intent)
and nietie (donation) among Hui is linguistic. In mosques,
nietie is often spoken of with such Chinese terms as “do-
nate money” (juankuan), “donate property” (juanzi), “give
alms” (shishe), and “collect donations” (mujuan). Often, the
Chinese verb-object construction does not distinguish be-
tween the thing given and the act of giving, for example: “I
give/gift/donate nietie” (wo gei/song/juan nietie). Although
this might suggest that Hui think of nietie as the material
object given, the thing itself, such a Whorfian interpretation
stressing the influence of linguistic categories on behavior
provides only a partial explanation. Rather, Hui practices
are influenced by the day-to-day ethics of the Chinese gift
economy (Kipnis 1997; Yan 1996).
Nietie blurs a distinction in the anthropology of gifts,
that is, between Mauss’s reciprocated gift and the “free gift.”
Mauss rebuked Malinowski’s notion of the pure or “free”
gift, arguing that all gifts are reciprocated (Mauss 1990, 73).
Reappraisals of Mauss, particularly through the example of
dana in Hinduism (Parry 1986) and Jainism (Laidlaw 2000),
suggest that Mauss’s criticism of Malinowski may have been
overreaching. As sadaqa, nietie is similar to thaan (also from
 Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China
the Sanskrit dana) in Theravada Buddhism (Bowie 1998). It
is a “free gift” from a donor to a deity or its representative,
a gift that is meant to absolve sin or accrue merit. It is less
the soteriological returns than the ones attached to notions
of “face” that suggest problematic elements of self-interest,
which have been seen as a particular problem in debates
about Mauss’s concept (Laidlaw 2000, 627).
As the currency of Muslim communities’ moral econ-
omy and a localized practice of sharia, nietie may entail
not only one’s interest in securing divine grace but also in
gaining social standing. Nietie exhibits the sociality of the
Chinese gift economy even if it is not exchanged between
individuals. The Chinese gift economy is based on the ethics
of social connections (guanxi) and face (mianzi). In Taoist
practices, donors follow these ethics in the private domain,
whereas public giving is strictly tributary or “free” (D.-R.
Yang 2005, 132).
Hui donating is also done in private or in public. Pub-
lic donors may identify themselves, an act which, at least
according to some commentators, invalidates the purity of
the gift (Derrida 1994). Along these lines, Bornstein’s (2009)
study of dan (the Hindi cognate for the Sanskrit dana) has
shown that much of modern philanthropy has rendered the
disinterested gift an impossibility. Hui nietie, however, as
minjian, is not wholly incorporated into the state’s official
channels for charity. In the Hui example, governance, ac-
countability, and transparency derive just as much from the
Chinese gift economy as they do from state surveillance
and management of public goods. Hence, self-interest for
Hui may not just be for returns in the afterlife, but also
for the here and now. The result is that Hui may attach
their names to their gifts, an act that obscures the intent
behind the gift, since the Koran (2:271) prescribes anony-
mous giving. Clerics periodically reminded their commu-
nities of this rule during Friday sermons. Yet, standing in
line waiting to contribute a donation to the nietie box in the
mosque courtyard, I often heard the accountant asking for
donors’ names. Sometimes, these donations are enshrined
in carved-stone monuments that reside permanently on
mosque grounds. Most donors provided their names with-
out hesitation. Others, often the better educated or those
who have performed the hajj, paused at the accoun-
tant’s question—a microtest of their humility. Among them,
a few abstained, and the donation became anonymous
(wuming).
Nietie combines an awareness of social relationships
(within the mosque community) with an act of piety (i.e.,
strengthening one’s relationship with God). It is at this level
that Chinese notions of face enter the social observance
of nietie, as remarked by the young official whose words
began this section. As Mauss noted, charity is not free of
antagonism (1990, 15–16, 65). So while Chinese Muslims
are hardly unique in their self-consciousness of giving, the
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
 American Ethnologist
customization of sadaqa has taken a particular Chinese
version of the maintenance of social status. Parallel with
local understandings of honor among Berbers (Jamous
1981) and Bedouins (Stewart 2000), Chinese culture has put
a “face” on intention, and in the process made it material,
thinglike.
Given such ethical confusion, different doctrinal
schools among Hui make sense of the tensions entailed in
nietie in a variety of ways. The scripturalists, who are mainly
Yihewanis but include some Salafis, see themselves as ad-
vocating “classical” Islam, and to this end seek greater ad-
herence to “pure” sharia and promote stricter rules about
giving. They, along with followers of the Tablighi Jamaʿat (a
missionizing movement), which has been active in Gansu
and Qinghai in recent years, are among the increasingly
loud voices calling for a “return” to the letter of the law.
Whereas clerics of traditionalist teaching schools cite the
14th−century Hanafi compendium of rules, the Sharh al-
wiqaya (Explanation of the protection), as providing a
basis for their understanding of the sharia of gifting, scrip-
turalists cite more recent commentaries from globally rec-
ognized jurists such as the Egyptian Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Donations are to be given to the accountant directly and
not to clerical staff. Scripturalists, who are predisposed to
finding evidence of modernity in the Koran, claim that ni-
etie is an Islamic system of income redistribution, specif-
ically in regard to the poor who line mosque entrances.
So while giving alms absolves the donor of sins, it ulti-
mately “ensures social equality,” as one scripturalist told
me. Thus, in the scripturalist interpretation, the social and
secular aims of nietie are harmonized with its religious
importance.
The marketization of Chinese society—even in rela-
tively poor western cities like Linxia, where the average
Hui makes 2,000 yuan ($292) a month—has exacerbated
gaps between the wealthy and the disadvantaged. Con-
spicuous consumption demonstrates that the market econ-
omy has become wedded to the gift economy (Osburg
2013; Smart 1993; M. M. Yang 2002). Yet material excess
may militate against Islamic piety. Scripturalists strongly
oppose such consumption practices as exploitative, bas-
ing their reading on the independent sources of sharia.
The government also inveighs against the problem of com-
modities taking the form of gifts (cf. Venkatesan 2011) but
on different grounds, labeling such practices “feudal,” vio-
lating tenets of Marxism-Leninism. It is more common for
Hui to attribute unlawful or haram behavior to members
of other teaching schools than to reflect on their own in-
adequacies. While the history of Islam in China is replete
with clashes between teaching schools, in contemporary
China, inter–teaching-school antagonism is subtler: an off-
the-cuff jibe, shoulder-bumping in the markets, or vague
disparagements in sermons.
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 2 May 2016

Shades of autonomy in China Beginning in the 17th century, Hui intellectuals began
writing texts that sought to explicate Islam through neo-
The example of nietie calls attention to minjian autonomy
Confucian analogues. In translating sharia, these scholars
as opposed to ethnic autonomy as the basis for Hui self-
privileged the category of li over fa so as not to invite the en-
definition. Ethnic autonomy differs according to Muslim
mity of the ruler who commanded law (Frankel 2011, 71–72;
ethnic group and region. Ningxia, where the Islamic finance
Tontini 2011, 518–19). This is why the Hui use of the Chinese
pilot project was started, is a Hui autonomous region. As a
term jiaofa is significant: even if it is an ethicized form of
result, Hui in Ningxia enjoy a greater degree of ethnic au-
sharia, Hui designate it “law” in the face of the party-state’s
tonomy than Hui living elsewhere, even if they have been
legal centralism. As a “religious law,” sharia is an authority
unable to enact autonomous legislation. That is, they can
that transcends the jurisdiction of the state (Pirie 2013, 102).
initiate projects to invite foreign exchange that Hui out-
At the same time, current Hui understandings of sharia
side Ningxia could not imagine doing. In other areas in the
have inherited the traditionalist view that law is an ethical
northwest, there are autonomous subregions that are nom-
commitment. That is, following sharia is a requirement to
inally Hui and installed in historically violent multiethnic
live a good life in preparation for the afterlife. An elder Hui
cities like Linxia. While the Linxia Hui Autonomous Pre-
summarized the legal and ethical dimensions of sharia as
fecture, which has Linxia as its capital, has enjoyed some
follows: “We consider it law. If we fail to abide by what the
power to enact local regulations, these are all but emptied
Koran says, in this life, then we will be punished in the af-
of sharia content. Thus, autonomy does not come as a grant
terlife. Activities like daily prayer, fasting, and giving alms—
from the state but is produced from the ground up.
these we must do!” While backed by the authority of reli-
Minjian autonomy also appears in shades. Anthropolo-
gious law, the demands the Hui elder lists are primarily con-
gists have traditionally viewed notions of the Chinese self as
cerned with what is ethically “good.” In other words, as with
inherently social, particularly through one’s social connec-
Hui nietie for niyyah, there is conceptual slippage in the lo-
tions or guanxi (e.g., Fei 1992). Gifting, understood as recip-
calization of sharia: what are elsewhere understood as ritual
rocal exchange, along with feasting, favors, and banqueting,
obligations for Muslims assume the generic status of “law”
is a central feature of the sociality of the Chinese self (e.g.,
among Hui.
M. M. Yang 1994). So while autonomy would seem to be the
Beginning in the early 20th century, revivalist strains
last concept appropriate to understand Chinese views of
of Islam have deepened sharia consciousness largely with-
the self, an anthropological interest in ethics suggests that
out antagonizing the party-state. There are thus a number
I reformulate the concept of autonomy as the cultivation of
of ethical projects led by different teaching schools among
the self through ethical practices, rather than as the individ-
the Hui, as seen in the example of nietie. The work of Hui
ual’s separation from others (Kleinman 2006; Stafford 2013;
in interpreting, debating, and justifying the authenticity
Zhang 2011).
of their law is the crucible of minjian autonomy. As with
The “ethical turn” in the anthropology of China has
Muslims elsewhere, hermeneutics constitutes a fundamen-
been mirrored, to some extent, by similar shifts in the an-
tal intellectual labor in the localization of Islam (Bowen
thropology of Islam (Moumtaz 2015). Most of the recent
1993; Geertz 1968; Messick 1993). Yet Hui are bereft of in-
work on the ethics of Islam has been done in Egypt, where
stitutional channels and representative bodies for articulat-
struggles have taken place over the relationship between
ing their justifications, and thus everyday practice, includ-
secular law and sharia, but where sharia has nonetheless
ing gifting, attains primacy in minjian autonomy.
been enshrined as one source of law in the country’s consti-
tution. Anthropologists have described how diverse actors
Between ethics and interest
mobilize the ethical aspects of sharia within such environ-
ments (Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005), but Muslim mi- Among Hui and across the teaching schools, the social ef-
norities in China may have additional obstacles given the fects of minjian autonomy vary. Any act of piety can also
regime’s hostility to grassroots religious movements. be a selfish act. For Hui, reform-era China is a mix of so-
The field of ethics has a long history in China, begin- cialist redistribution and runaway capitalism. Competitive
ning in the early imperial Confucian school, which elabo- nietie, through which members of the same mosque try
rated a system of ritualized ethics (C: li) that promoted har- to outdo one another, shows that a market-based society
monious relations between the ruler and ruled as well as may intensify gift exchange. The egalitarian ethic behind
within the family. The category of law (C: fa) has a lower sta- sadaqa meets the egoistic impulse that animates Chinese
tus in Chinese society (Granet 1934; Weber 1951), although gift giving, illustrating Hui “value pluralism.” In his cri-
this has been partly an effect of historiography (Ruskola tique of the anthropology of Islam, Laidlaw (2014) argues
2013). As understood by Hui, sharia has inherited both that anthropologists’ description of piety movements and
fa and li. Hui, who follow the Hanafi school of jurispru- ethical projects flattens subjective experiences that are not
dence, must, like Muslims everywhere, abide by sharia.8 without angst. Hui charity, subject to the demands of the

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132

 Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China
“socialist” market, routinized Chinese gifting, and sharia,
leads to a number of outcomes, in the course of Hui striving
to reconcile their religious and secular lives (cf. Khan 2012;
Schielke 2015).
One response to value pluralism among Hui is height-
ened individualism. As Yan Yunxiang (Yan 2009) has shown,
while the religious revival in the reform period has reawak-
ened ethical practices, it has also intensified individual-
ism, which is one trajectory of autonomous action in Hui
communities. For instance, Hui youth may seek to take ad-
vantage of openings offered by official policy to leave the
poor northwest (and their parents). They pursue Arabic-
language instruction in the hopes of attaining lucrative
careers as translators for Middle Eastern businessmen in
eastern cities like Yiwu, Shenzhen, or Guangzhou. In ad-
dition, young men and women may study in Muslim-
majority countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,
or Malaysia. They aspire to surmount the constraints of
living in China and to worship and work alongside Mus-
lim brothers and sisters. Such aspirations can be idealis-
tic. One young Hui woman I met in Yiwu, who worked as
a translator for Muslim Middle Eastern and North African
businessmen who bought wholesale goods from Han Chi-
nese sellers, found them to be “lustful” (C: haose). Ac-
tual encounters could turn ethical models—the foreign
Muslim—on their head, and not a few Hui youth, like this
woman, return to the northwest. In short, self-interested
giving indexes one trend of growing individualization
among Hui that can be rationalized as congruent with at-
tempts to live a better life in accordance with the precepts
of Islam.
Autonomy is often equated with individualism in the
liberal, and specifically Kantian, tradition (Dworkin 1988;
for critiques, see Ferguson 2013 and Mahmood 2005).
Among Hui, increasing individuation is one outcome of
navigating value pluralism, but another response to eth-
ical conflict is to reentrench the teaching schools as the
interpreters of sharia. The party-state has sought to as-
suage teaching-school divisions by advocating a “united”
Islam led by the CCP, and increasing contacts with for-
eign Muslims have softened the hard edges of teach-
ing school identity. Still, in pockets of Hui populations
throughout northwest China, the teaching school re-
mains a sanctified touchstone in resolving difficulties be-
tween Chinese values, Islamic values, and those of the
state.
For example, the building of mosques and other places
of worship commonly spark contention. As donations go
mainly to either maintaining prayer space or creating new
ones, the purpose of charity has drawn Hui attention to
thinking about the “good.” During one sermon I attended,
a traditionalist cleric explicitly sought to delineate the rela-
tionship between Chinese custom and proper belief in the
context of burial monuments:
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
 American Ethnologist
In actual life, many people have missed the meaning of
burial rites in their conduct and merely seek to express
their filial piety before the judgments of others. They
spend lavishly and make endless comparisons, even to
the point of erecting tall buildings. Corrupt customs
become common practice whose influence is spread
widely.
For the cleric, the Chinese ethic of filial piety is con-
sonant with Islamic orthodoxy. But there are limits—for
example, using donations to build mausoleums for de-
ceased parents runs afoul of the Prophet’s teachings. The
cleric’s admonition implicitly criticizes Sufis who spend
large amounts to erect tall shrines (C: gongbei) to their
fallen saints. In 2015, one Sufi group in Linxia constructed a
massive, five-story-high dome, which towered over nearby
shrines and the city square. Hui who prayed at neighboring
shrines would grit their teeth and raise their arms overhead
in disgust as they walked by. Autonomy takes the form not
only of “correct” practice but also of the obligatory denunci-
ation of “incorrect” practice (Cook 2004). Doctrinal groups
thus advance discourses that are both “authorizing” (Asad
1993) and deauthorizing.
Gifted properties
We see the clearest conflict between state law and
sharia in the area of inheritance law. The Koranic guide-
lines on dividing property are very clear. My father fol-
lowed these in dividing his property. Waqfs are related
to inheritance law and property law. The puzi [shops]
one sees outside Chinese mosques are not true waqfs.
At one time they were. But we don’t have a recording.
We have lost the name of the donor. A true waqf is a
donation from a mosque member for public benefit.
Historically, there have been many of these in Linxia.
[Now] nearly every mosque has its waqfs, but these
are bu gongkai [literally “not public,” a euphemism for
“illegal”].
The above quotation is from a prominent neo-
conservative cleric whom Hui call a “minjian cleric,” since
he is not registered by the local bureau of religious affairs.
He voices melancholia at the state of waqfs in contem-
porary Linxia (“not true waqfs”). As a Salafi, he tended to
compare China to Egypt and found Hui lacking in sharia
consciousness. Whereas nietie illustrates how Hui reconcile
Islamic charity with non-Muslim custom (namely the Chi-
nese gift economy), waqfs, a form of nietie as real property,
call attention to the constraints imposed on nietie by social-
ist property rights. State interests are entwined in creating
waqfs as the party-state has made property a central tenet
of reform. Waqfs in China are a real property conveyance
embedded in both Islamic and socialist property rules. A
fundamental dimension of their autonomy, Hui property
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 2 May 2016
relations take the form of property endowment that is not
quite a waqf.
The waqf is a complex institution that lies at the con-
vergence of property law, administrative law, and inheri-
tance law. To qualify as a waqf, its founder must satisfy two
requirements, neither of which are legal under PRC prop-
erty law: the founder must (1) own rights to the property
and (2) convey these rights to the public good in perpetu-
ity, giving up all property rights. Once the conveyance is
concluded, the object is considered the property of God.
Hui learn about such forms of property from a variety of
sources. For instance, the Sharh al-Wiqaya provides in-
struction on the “zakat of real property,” under which it in-
cludes the waqf. Unlike niyyah, the term waqf refers both to
the act of transferring property for some charitable purpose
and the property itself.
In pre-Communist China, Chinese Muslims used waqfs
for a variety of purposes (Li 2000, 51). Additionally, welfare
foundations served pilgrims on the hajj and Sufis traveling
to holy sites in locations such as South Asia. In Linxia, many
mosques and Sufi tombs were initially built through a waqf
donation. The tombs have attained the status of sacred sites
where the founder of the order was born, received his in-
struction, lived, or died.
The differences between the waqf and its Chinese in-
stantiation appeared in the mid-20th century as a result
of the modern state’s creation, giving rise to the disjunc-
tion voiced by the neoconservative teacher. In the 1950s,
land nationalization was a priority of the Communists, who
viewed the large tracts held by Sufi tombs and mosques
as buttressing the landlord class and requisitioned them
under the guise of “land reform.” While Hui financed Sufi
tombs through waqfs before 1949, under the socialist prop-
erty regime, the state owns land, and despite increasing pri-
vatization (Erie 2007), the state still valorizes public owner-
ship. The current property regime divides land into urban
and rural land and allows individuals to obtain use rights
in both but permits them to sell only urban use rights.9
Use-right transfers, however, must be authorized by land
bureaus, which prohibit land from being used to establish
perpetual pious endowments. Consequently, Sufis are dou-
bly dependent on “internal funding,” or nietie. The status
of land-use rights in the northwest is tied to the historical
relationship between property and religion.
The waqf survives in reform-era China, however, in ab-
breviated form, illustrating Hui desire to abide by sharia.
To establish a waqf, the mosque usually collects nietie from
members, pools the funds, and purchases land usually ad-
jacent to or near the mosque. Under PRC law, developers
obtain both the use rights in land and the rights to develop
real estate above ground. The legal definition of a real es-
tate developer would appear to exclude religious entities.10
Under the Regulations on Religious Affairs, religious enti-
ties may obtain the certificate of use rights in land under
10
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
the mosque, but may not engage in the transfer, mortgag-
ing, or development of property. The rights of religious or-
ganizations under PRC law exclude such privileges. A Hui
lawyer in a judicial department near Linxia explained that a
mosque may purchase the real estate certificate for fixtures
above the land, but the use rights remain in the name of a
donor. Thus, the conveyance does not result in the donor’s
relinquishing its rights in the land (as required by sharia),
but the work-around allows mosque communities to follow
the spirit of sharia in using land for religious purposes.
Waqfs often take the form of what many Hui call “store-
front waqfs” (C: puzi wagefu) (see Figure 3). Most mosques
in Linxia, as elsewhere in China, feature shops facing the
street on the periphery of their state-granted property. I
visited a jewelry store operated by two brothers that was
a storefront waqf of Linxia’s oldest mosque. The brothers
lease space from the mosque, and the income generated
from the lease goes to support the mosque’s daily opera-
tions. As lessees, the brothers are members of the commu-
nity surrounding the mosque. This is not always the case.
For example, a traditionalist mosque in northwestern Linxia
rents out its street-level property to a Han-owned pharma-
ceutical company. That some scripturalists point out that it
is unlawful (A: haram) for a mosque to permit business on
its grounds does not gain traction in Linxia, where teaching
schools have little choice but to combine prayer space with
revenue-generating enterprises.11
In addition to storefront waqfs, which are legal under
PRC law, mosques have illegal waqfs, as the neoconserva-
tive Hui quoted above noted. Hui refer to such waqfs as
minjian rather than illegal (C: feifa), although Hui talked
to me about such property arrangements only sotto voce.
Some donors, often of the scripturalist or neoconservative
bent, have given their land-use rights to mosques, contra-
vening state law by not having such conveyances notarized
by relevant state bureaus. There are tax consequences to
such illegal transfers as well, but the problems are resolved
by mosque leaders and real estate officials who trade favors.
In return for not registering a property transfer, Hui officials
consult the mosque cleric on personal matters. The “free
gift” of the waqf initiates a chain of gifting; the initial donor
may not receive direct benefits in the form of return gifts,
but donors of land to mosques undoubtedly gain reputa-
tional recognition in giving. Economic capital is thus con-
verted to social capital (Bourdieu 1986) as one exercise of
minjian autonomy.
While nietie, a public gift, receives immediate acclaim
through the up-to-date placards in the center of mosques,
illegal waqfs go unpublicized. When I asked a cleric of a
mosque who has several such waqfs if I could see the land-
use transfer certificates, I was told they are stashed in a
locked box in the mosque office and are “bu gongkai” (not
public). Unlike the “free gift” in Hindu India that conveys
the sin of the giver requiring the recipient to give it to
 Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China
Figure 3. Storefront waqfs (pious endowments) outside South Gate Grand Mosque in Linxia, China, in 2009.
another or invite misfortune (Parry 1986), the waqf begins
a sequence of gifts, “licit” and “illicit” under different reg-
isters, that travel through various circuits. What is pious
under one legal regime (e.g., Islamic) may be “contrary to
the public interest” in another (e.g., socialist). In the case
of minjian waqfs, the discrepancy is reconciled by conceal-
ment, that is, by burying any conflict that would come to
the surface. Concealment from the anthropologist was just
as common as evading state law and its representatives.
As with nietie, the waqf shows different conceptions
of the public “good.” Hui establish waqfs through different
systems in pursuit of their definition of this good. The gift is
born of tension not only between sociality and selfishness,
as in Mauss’s analysis, but also between different normative
systems that continually intersect one another, from Islamic
ethics to Chinese gift giving to market economies, includ-
ing socialist property regimes and free market commoditi-
zation. As Nada Moumtaz has noted, establishing waqfs is
a form of ethical conduct, of extending the practice of be-
ing a “good” Muslim beyond ritual matters “to the total-
ity of one’s life” (2015, 133). Yet the state-owned property
rights regime in China creates obstacles to Hui broadening
their piety beyond the ritual domain. Hui respond to po-
tential conflicts among and within these values through a
spectrum of strategies, including subterfuge and legal eva-
sion. While many waqf operators, such as the two jeweler
brothers, do not reflect on the conflicts between state and
religious norms, rather it is “business as usual,” for those
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
 American Ethnologist
with knowledge of sharia, whose numbers are growing, the
blockages of secular law are a source of estrangement from
their own law.
Gifting through plural values
The “free gift,” and specifically Hui charity practices, illumi-
nate what I have called minjian autonomy as experienced
by Hui. Hui minjian autonomy contributes to a broader
rethinking of the relationship between human flourishing
and authority, whether religious or political. Hui charity in-
vites a reexamination of anthropological approaches to gifts
(“free” or otherwise) through greater attention to the mul-
tiple systems of rules, including law, religion, and culture,
that give shape to the gift.
Charitable giving is a soteriological imperative for Hui
and sheds light on what minjian autonomy looks like from
the perspective of Hui. Only by following the ethical pre-
scriptions of sharia, including alms giving, can Hui return
to as near an unblemished state as possible before being
judged in the afterlife. Yet in following the path of sharia,
Hui also abide by non-Muslim customs. Their practices are
further constrained by socialist law, which serves both CCP
interests and those of the market. To follow their own rules,
Hui confront ethical quandaries.
“Free” gifting is thus one aspect of what Saba
Mahmood calls a “positive conception of ethics,” which
she understands as moving beyond ethics as justification
11
American Ethnologist  Volume 43 Number 2 May 2016
to considering the practices and desires that inform ethics
(2005, 25). Laidlaw has argued that the depiction of
Muslim ethics in the account of Mahmood and others as-
sumes a relationship between subject and ethical regime
that operates at the “unreflective, taken-for-granted, and
affective level” (Laidlaw 2014, 166–67). In contrast, Hui
charitable giving shows aspects of both “embodied” prac-
tices and of reflectivity. Mosque leaders instruct followers
in correct practice through oral exhortations, writings, and
prayer. Yet many Hui are constantly reflecting on the cor-
rectness of their practices by comparing them with images
made available by the increasing visibility of Islam in the
public sphere. Subsequently, they may change doctrinal af-
filiation or become “born again” Muslims. Even a small
number of Han Chinese, usually those who feel left behind
in China’s modernization drive, have converted to Islam
and reside in Linxia, where they pursue pious practices, like
giving, with redoubled conviction.
Charitable gifting indexes such processes as min-
jian autonomy, which thus operates through, rather than
against, structures of authority. It does not seek to con-
front political or religious leadership. Violent opposition
may occur when secular or numinous authority exceeds its
own limits, and the history of northwest China is replete
with examples of Hui rebelling against both state figures
and would-be spiritual leaders. Minjian autonomy suggests
that freedom to pursue life in accordance with ethical-legal
guidance can subsist despite secular or religious dogma. In
fact, such tensions may sustain the desire for autonomy.
Hui charity invites a rethinking of how anthropologists
conceptualize institutions, such as the gift. No longer can
anthropologists study the domain of ritual to the exclusion
of the legal or unitary perceptions of gifting as customary as
opposed to modern (Buggenhagen 2011; Fernando 2010).
Instead, multiple and sometimes competing systems pull
and tug at the gift, its offering and return. In sum, the gift
may have dimensions that are multiform, contrasting with
Mauss’s theory of a uniform gift.
Tensions between the rules of different normative or-
ders lead to consequences, immediate and long term, ma-
terial and imaginary, as members of any given group give,
receive, and return. Whereas state law may distrust the gift
(Hyland 2009, 7), it may also reshape it into novel forms
or drive it underground. Just as rules “from above” affect
the gift, so too do rules “from below” as Chinese customs
create desires that also re-form the nature of the gift. More
generally, situating the gift in the matrix of rules—local and
transnational as well as religious and secular—that char-
acterize contexts of overlapping jurisdictions (e.g., border-
lands, diasporas, transitional economies, etc.), brings the
gift into the study of plural societies. Actors may have dif-
ferent attachments to diverse sets of practices (affective,
emancipatory, ill informed, forced, or resented) as they con-
tinually resituate themselves vis-à-vis authorities through
12
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2781132
alternately transparent or concealed gifts, in accordance
with decisions they make given different contexts. The gift
as envisioned thus requires anthropologists to hone in on
the ways that such actors constitute their social world, just
as such actors are constituted through engaging such rules
and negotiating the systems they derive from.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The fieldwork conducted for this article was
supported by the National Science Foundation and a Fulbright-
Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. Write-up
was supported by the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in
China Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Princeton Institute
for International and Regional Studies. The article benefited from
presentations at the Himalayan Studies Conference at Yale Univer-
sity, the Department and Program of Near Eastern Studies and the
Program of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, the Amer-
ican Anthropological Association annual meeting, the East Asian
Law and Society Conference at Koguan Law School in Shanghai,
China, and the “Islamic Law in Society” symposium at New York
University’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. The author
thanks Niko Besnier, Michael Gilsenan, Mark Massoud, John Os-
burg, Hans Steinmüller, Benjamin van Rooij, Naomi Yamada, and
four anonymous reviewers for their comments on drafts. Any mis-
takes are the author’s.
1. During my fieldwork, one US dollar equaled about 6.83
Chinese yuan.
2. Elsewhere in China, Hong Kong is establishing itself as a hub
for Islamic bonds (Arabic: sukuk). In 2014, the Hong Kong govern-
ment issued its first Islamic bond for $1 billion. Financial innova-
tions, however, occur much slower on the mainland.
3. This fear is hardly unique to China. Since 9/11, many states
have characterized Islamic charity as financing for Islamic extrem-
ism (Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2009; Burr and Collins 2006).
4. Throughout this article, I use the abbreviation A to mark words
and phrases in Arabic, and C to mark those in Chinese.
5. The relationships of Hui and Uyghurs to the party-state and
to majority Han peoples are completely different. Hui are scat-
tered throughout the country, look like Han Chinese, and speak
Mandarin. Uyghurs are consolidated in Xinjiang, look Central
Asian, and speak a Turkic language. Xinjiang was integrated very
late into the Chinese state, and its rule has been tenuous.
6. The romanization of the Arabic plural is awqaf, but I use waqfs
for simplicity.
7. In recent years, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has issued a num-
ber of regulations concerning philanthropy and the establishment
of charitable organizations.
8. Technically, if Muslims follow the Hanafi school of jurispru-
dence and reside outside the “abode of Islam” (dar al-Islam), as
is the case of Hui, then Islamic courts have no jurisdiction over
them, and they must follow most of the prohibitions of Islamic law
(e.g., adultery, theft, alcohol consumption) (Abou El Fadl 1994, 173–
74).
9. See the Land Administration Law of the PRC, amended by
the National People’s Congress (NPC), August 28, 2004, articles 2
and 63.
10. The legal definition is set out in the Urban Real Estate Ad-
ministration Law of the PRC, passed by the NPC, August 30, 2007,
article 30.
11. The Chinese translation of the jurist Sayyid Sabiq’s writings
titled Islamic Commercial Law (C: Yisilan shangyefa) by the
Muslim Youth Translators Group (a Salafi organization)
 Sharia, charity, and minjian autonomy in Muslim China
characterizes economic exchange within mosques as repre-
hensible (Sabiq 2002, 21).
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Matthew S. Erie
China Centre
University of Oxford
Canterbury Road
Oxford OX2 6LU
United Kingdom
matthew.erie@orinst.ox.ac.uk