Substantive editing sample 57:
Shari’a law in China

In this academic (ethnographic) manuscript, I needed to carefully attend to the transliteration of Chinese words (according to the modern pinyin system, with one notable Wade-Giles exception). Also, according to the instructions for this assignment, I needed to ensure that Arabic names and common words were transliterated according to the International Journal of Middle East Studies [IJMES] system, a slight modification of the ALA-LC [American Library Association and the Library of Congress] system (for example, Akhbār aṣ-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind), not the ‘Omar system, a modification of the UNGEGN [United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names] system (for example, Akhbâr as-Sîn wa-l-Hind), the system I had followed on an assignment exploring the religious implications of the Qur’ān. I also needed to attend to the accommodation of Arabic "sun letters" with the article al-. Finally, I needed to correct historical inaccuracies, improve word choice in a number of places (capturing the author's intended shade of meaning), and ensure the proper treatment of citations and bibliographical entries.

The publisher's style stipulations specified that the reference list should conform to the 15th edition of the University of Chicago Manual of Style for capitalization and punctuation of works cited but the 16th edition for other issues.

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This sample is presented here with the author’s permission.

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“Every town has a thing called al-dara. This is a bell placed near [lit. ‘at the head of’] the ruler of the town and is tied to a cord stretching as far as the road for the [benefit] of the common people.” If a person is wronged by another person, he/she shakes the cord that is linked to al-dara. When doing so, al-Tājir observes, “the bell near the ruler starts ringing. So he [the wronged] is allowed to enter [the palace] to relate personally what the matter is and to explain the wrong done to him” (Hermes 2013, 214). Thus Sulaymān al-Tājir, the ninth century Iranian merchant and author of Accounts of India and China (Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) depicts access to justice in rural imperial China based upon his observations of life in Guandong. However embellished al-Tājir’s account of the justice bell or al-dara (Ch. duo) may be, his description of law in China marks a significant departure from the earliest European and American assessments of Chinese law. Max Weber saw Chinese religion making no distinction between ritual norms and legal prescriptions, thus, impeding the rationalization of law, as well as the emergence of a capitalist economy (1951, 147; 1978[1922], 577). Marcel Granet, student of Émile Durkheim, faulted Chinese thought for the lack of law, writing, “The Chinese did not conceive the idea of Law” (1934, 341). Even Chinese scholars have internalized such views. Fei Xiaotong, one of the founders of modern social sciences in China, described Chinese society in terms of Gemeinschaft or mechanical solidarity predicated on ritual and customs, and concluded about China “there is no way for laws…to develop in rural society“ (Fei 1992[1947], 43). One of the defining debates in the study of modern law has been whether China has an illiberal “rule of law” (Lubman 1999; Peerenboom 2002). As Edward Said and has progeny have argued, the production of knowledge is generative of power relations between subject and object. According to Said, this is the history of Orientalism, familiarized as the West viewing the East. Teemu Ruskola has argued that this perspective has defined the comparative study of law in China (2013).1 My point of departure is to ask what difference does it make, if any, when the East views the East? What epistemological potentials are presented by decentering the West’s monopoly on viewing legal others? Al-Tājir’s observations illustrate one perspective of the ‘Near East ’ viewing the ‘Far East ’. In this book, I reverse the subject-object order to ask what can be learned about Islam and China (and indirectly, the West) through Chinese law’s perspective on shari‘a? In this chapter, I examine the ways in which authoritarian China manages legal pluralism. Any attempt to address this question must consider the historical Chinese state’s view of Islamic law. This relationship between secular law and Islamic law assumes a variety of qualities, including recognition, non-recognition, and misrecognition, co-optation, competition, subordination, hegemony, manipulation, dependence, valorization, transmutation, and envy. This relationship varies according to the nature of the historical Chinese state (i.e., imperial, Republican, or Communist) as well as the nature of the Muslim community in question (defined by ethnicity and race, region, and language). A general thread from the late imperial period to the modern nation-state that caused transformations to shari‘a in the evolving and contingent co-existence of state law and Islamic law was the gradual narrowing of shari‘a through both discursive and institutional means. During the transition from empire to nation, official discourse concerning shari‘a shaped the substance and procedures of shari‘a so that it became ‘custom’-like, religious without being political, and emphatically Chinese. Additionally, the Communists adapted a number of Soviet–inspired institutions and policies that survive to the present day. These institutions further marginalize shari‘a in the public sphere through legislation, “representative bodies,” and policy making. Wael Hallaq has observed that the rise of the nation-state has led to the “structural demise” of shari‘a (Hallaq 2009, 500). The history of shari‘a in China, however, is one of a long-term adaptation that preceded the modern state. As a result, the effects on Islamic law were more atrophy than amputation. The nation-state, particularly under socialist law and Communist policy, has nevertheless radically altered the viability of shari‘a in the everyday lives of Muslim minorities in China. Islamic revival in reform period has also renewed interest in shari‘a, complicating the Party-State’s definition of Islam. Shari‘a has a history in China for as long as Muslims have been in China, that is, since the seventh century C.E., shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Following Muslims’ accommodation to Chinese society, shari‘a underwent transformations in the imperial period in its jurisdiction, substance and procedures, sources, and institutions. In addition, at various points, the state co-opted Muslim elite into the Confucian bureaucracy. In the modern era, new ideologies, including secularism, nationalism, and socialism, reinterpreted categories of difference such as law. From hierarchical and vertical structures of law and government, the state designed a legal system that emphasized horizontal and homogenous institutions under which citizens officially enjoyed equal rights. Yet at the same time, law based on citizenship normalized a new kind of hierarchy of difference based on ethnicity. The current status of shari‘a in the PRC is a result of these broader reformations that are not without internal contradictions. The narrowing of shari‘a in China is common to global transformations during the early twentieth century, a period of Western colonization and the diffusion of techniques of colonial governance. Legal reforms that straddled the end of the empire and the genesis of the modern nation-state borrowed some of these techniques, namely, custom. Whereas Western colonialists used custom for purposes of both everyday rule and to legitimate ‘superior’ colonial law in faraway colonies, the Chinese experience illustrates a domestic invocation of orientalism.2 The ‘customization’ of shari‘a not only further narrowed its scope, but emptied it of many of its rules and institutions that could compete with state secular law. However, the long history of Muslims in China, the imperial state’s governance over Chinese Muslims, and the Chinese experience with nationalism distinguish the China case from the encounter of Western colonial powers with Islam. Shari‘a, recast as ‘customary law’, became wedded to a particular Chinese concept of ethnicity through state institution building and official discourse, as part of the construction of a modern China. The Transformation of Shari‘a in Chinese Empire In the imperial period, as Chinese Muslims adapted to Chinese society and governance, shari‘a practice was increasingly relegated to private and familial matters. At periods, namely during the Yuan Dynasty and during the Qing dynasty, the state used Islam and its law to govern Muslim populations. At different times, imperial governance operated to marginalize, bureaucratize, and customize shari‘a. The history of shari‘a in the imperial period hence parallels trajectories of Islamic and state law in the Russian and Ottoman Empires as well as British colonization of India and Malaysia. While the earliest contacts between Chinese and Muslim communities appear to have occurred overland through West Asia via Iran in the fourth century B.C.E., by the Tang Dynasty, there were growing communities of Arab and Persian traders, merchant, and envoys on the southeast coast. In what has become known as the “maritime Silk Road,” Muslim businessmen who purchased Chinese porcelain and silk took up residence in coastal cities.… 17 pages later (a few pages into a section under a different heading: "The Customization of Islamic Law") The Abstracts of the Record of the Civil and Commercial Affairs Customs Survey, hereinafter, “Abstracts,” select which Islamic rules to represent and record (and which to discard). The view that emerges from these few references to Muslim customs is that Muslim minorities historically practiced Islamic laws of social relations (mu‘āmalāt). This area of the law provided guidance on such topics as polygyny, marriage and remarriage, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, and such life cycle events as the wedding ceremony. Two points can be drawn from the extent of minority customs as recorded in the customary law surveys in the late Qing and early Republic. First, during this period, customary law referred not to just to non-Han minorities, but to Han Chinese, too. With the exception of the customs excerpted above, the vast majority of the over 3,000 customs recorded in the Abstracts were those of the Han. In accord with Chiang Kai-shek’s theory of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu), collective national identity was embedded in customary law of and for the nation. The Republican version of the custom survey was similar to the reconstruction of adat (tradition, custom, social system, propriety in Dutch colonial law) in 1950s Indonesia. Supreme Court reconstructed codes of adat, initially written by Dutch colonialists, as blueprints for the post-revolutionary nation. By ‘nationalizing’ adat, the state sought to extend rules specific to local communities to the nation as a whole (Bowen 1988, 280). Second, although Islamic law is not a major field of investigation in the survey, it is named as “Islamic custom” (huijiao xiguan). For perhaps the first time in official writings, Islamic law in China is labeled as custom. It is not conceived of as foreign legal system or even the local substantiation of a global religion with roots outside of China, but rather, it is a primordial affect of an indigenous Chinese group: “Huimin,” collectively, those who believe in Islam in China. The Record of the Civil and Commercial Affairs Customs Survey, hereinafter, “Record,” purports to provide a comprehensive and systematized index of customary law. Bourgon, however, has argued that due to variety of factors, including inconsistencies between survey instructions designed by officials in centralized bureaucracies and the actual survey results of the field workers caused by the incongruity between the five German fields of law identified for survey inspection and the messy reality of customs on the ground, compounded by lost or otherwise destroyed data, in terms of its principal goal, the project was in “a spectacular failure after two decades of patient efforts” (2005, 101). 412 pages later Bibliography Bourgon, Jérôme. 2005. "Rights, Freedoms, and Customs in the Making of Chinese Civil Law, 1900-1936". In Realms of Freedom in Modern China, ed. W. C. Kirby, 84-112. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Bowen, John R. 1988. The Transformation of an Indonesian Property System: Adat, Islam, and Social Change in the Gayo Highlands. American Ethnologist 15: 274-293. Chen, Li. 2010. Law & Sensibility of Empire in the Making of Modern China. Ph.D. Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University. Fei, Xiaotong. 1992[1947]. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley, University of California Press. Granet, Marcel. 1934. La Pensée Chinoise. Paris, La Renaissane du Livre. Hallaq, Wael B. 2009. Sharī‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Hermes, Nizar F. 2013. "The Orient's Medieval 'Orient'(alism)': The Riḥla of Sulaymān al-Tājir". In Orientalism Revisted: Art, Land, and Voyage, ed. I. R. Netton, 207-222. Routledge, London and New York. Lie, John. 1996. Sociology of Contemporary Japan. Current Sociology 44 (1): 1-96. Lubman, Stanley B. 1999. Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press. Peerenboom, Randall. 2002. China's Long March toward Rule of Law. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ruskola, Teemu. 2013. Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Schein, Louisa. 1997. Gender and Internal Orientalism in China. Modern China 23 (1): 69-98. Weber, Max. 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. New York, The Free Press. ------. 1978[1922]. Economy and Society. 1. Berkeley, University of California Press. 2 pages later Endnotes 1 Recently, Li Chen has argued contra Ruskola that Western thinkers from Montesquieu to William Blackstone saw in Chinese law a potential model for legal systems in the West (Chen 2010) 2 There is a broad literature that examines both Asian and Islamic self-representations based on pre-existing archetypes and essentialisms, some of which were developed in the West. Scholars have called this process a number of names including “auto Orientalism” (Lie 1996), “self-Orientalism” (Chu 2013), and “internal Orientalism” (Schein 1997).…

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“Every town has a thing called al-dara. This is a bell placed near [lit. ‘at the head of’] the ruler of the town and is tied to a cord stretching as far as the road for the [benefit] of the common people.” If a person is wronged by another person, he/she shakes the cord that is linked to al-dara. When doing so, al-Tājir observes, “the bell near the ruler starts ringing. So he [the wronged] is allowed to enter [the palace] to relate personally what the matter is and to explain the wrong done to him” (Hermes 2013, 214). [Being that the epigraph is, overall, Hermes's words, I do not alter it, although if the words had been yours, editable by me, I would have suggested the following changes: (1) the abbreviation "lit." might be changed to "literally," (unless you would be using that abbreviation throughout); (2) The deprecated "he/she" could be changed to "he or she"; (3) the dangling modifier "When doing so," (absurdly implying that the bell, rather than the person wronged, is doing the shaking of the cord) should be changed to "Then,"; and (4) "explain the wrong done to him" might be better expressed as "explain the wrong that had been done to him." Not one of those infelicities, however, warrants an inserted "[sic]" from you as the author within the block quotation of Hermes.] Thus Sulaymān al-Tājir Thus, Sulaymān at-Tājir, [since T is a "sun letter," the title would be pronounced "Sulaymān at-Tājir"--and, as we discussed, I am revising "al-" when a sun letter (t, th, d, dh, r, z, s, sh, ṣ, ṭ, ḍ, ẓ, l, or n) follows it; of course, within a quote (such as the foregoing epigraph) or in the titles of the bibliography, the "al-" (even when followed by a sun letter) must stand] the ninth century Iranian the ninth-century Iranian merchant and author of Accounts of India and China (Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) depicts access China (Akhbār aṣ-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) depicts the access to justice in rural imperial China based China, based upon his observations of life in Guandong. However embellished al-Tājir’s account embellished at-Tājir’s account of the justice bell or al-dara (Ch. duo) may bell, or ad-dara (Ch. duo), [I assume you are using "Ch." throughout to mean "Chinese" (and I will add it to your list of abbreviations at the end of the manuscript)] may be, his description of law in China marks a significant departure from ["a significant departure from" implies that ninth-century at-Tājir's account was after the accounts of the Europeans and Americans] China is very different from the earliest European and American assessments of Chinese law. Max Weber saw Chinese religion making no law. According to Max Weber, Chinese religion made no distinction between ritual norms and legal prescriptions, thus, impeding the prescriptions, [should this be "proscriptions"?] an indiscrimination that impeded the rationalization of law, as law as well as the emergence of a capitalist economy (1951, 147; 1978[1922], 577). Marcel [see University of Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), the "bible" of the publishing industry, 15.38 for author-date text citations that have more than one year (also, the earlier year, 1922 of the two-year work, would be listed before the 1951 work by Weber)] economy ([1922] 1978, 577; 1951, 147). Marcel Granet, student of Émile Durkheim, faulted Chinese thought for the lack for its lack of law, writing, “The Chinese law, writing that “[t]he Chinese did not conceive the idea of Law” (1934, 341). Even Chinese scholars have internalized such views. Fei Xiaotong, one of the founders of modern social sciences in China, described Chinese society in terms of Gemeinschaft or Gemeinschaft, or mechanical solidarity predicated on ritual and customs, and concluded about China “there China that “there is no way for laws…to develop in rural society“ (Fei 1992[1947], 43). One society“ (Fei [1947] 1992, 43). One of the defining debates in the study of modern law has been whether China has an illiberal “rule of law” (Lubman 1999; Peerenboom 2002). As Edward Said and has progeny and his followers [the main definition of progeny is offspring] have argued, the production of knowledge is generative of power knowledge generates power relations between subject and object. According to Said, this is the history this fact is demonstrated by the history of Orientalism, familiarized of orientalism, familiarized as the West viewing the East. Teemu Ruskola has argued that this perspective has defined the comparative study of law in China (2013).1 My point of departure is to ask what difference [the preceding is needlessly wordy; your reader will know that what you assert in your book is your "point of departure," and "But" indicates that you are departing from the West-regarding-East viewpoint; by the way, the prohibition against beginning a sentence with conjunctions "But" or "And" is deprecated] But what difference does it make, if any, when the East views the East? What epistemological potentials are presented by decentering the West’s monopoly on viewing legal others? Al-Tājir’s observations viewing other legal systems? [or "... other legal notions?"] At-Tājir’s observations illustrate one perspective of the ‘Near East ’ viewing the ‘Far East ’. In the “Near East ” viewing the “Far East.” [CMS stipulates, for American prose, that single quotation marks be reserved for nested quotations within quotations--or for technical definitions within linguistic or phonetic studies (CMS 7.50) or to name horticultural cultivars (CMS 8.129)] In this book, I reverse the subject-object order to ask what can be learned about Islam and China (and indirectly, the West) through Chinese law’s perspective on shari‘a? on shari‘a, or Islamic law. [(1) Shari‘a is a foreign word and so should be italicized, even in a title; (2) shari‘a should technically (according to the IJMES system) be transliterated with a macron over the i--but the IJMES word list has it without that macron. I assume the word list trumps--yes? (even though some of the titles in the bibliography have the macron over the i); (3) "or Islamic law" OK? it seems a definition of shari‘a at its first instance is appropriate here; (4) An indirect question ("...in order to ask what...") gets no question mark] In this chapter, I examine the ways in which authoritarian China manages legal pluralism. Any attempt to address this question must consider the historical Chinese state’s view of Islamic law. This relationship law. The relationship between secular law and Islamic law assumes a variety of qualities, including [this long list is best introduced with an em dash] qualities—including recognition, non-recognition, and misrecognition, [I realize the preceding 3 items are a trio and, conceivably, can be set off from the other items, but that means we need heavy semicolons to separate each one of the other items; I think just having them appear together first in your long list is sufficient] recognition, nonrecognition, and misrecognition, [[(1) CMS 7.85, as well as Merriam Webster, contradicts MS Word's spellcheck function--and stipulates "non-" prefixes to be closed up (no hyphen), except in compounds like non-self-sustaining or if misreading is likely to result; (2) as for the remaining items in the long series, we should ensure that their arrangement is not random--for just one example, should "dependence" be next to "envy"?] co-optation, competition, subordination, hegemony, manipulation, dependence, valorization, transmutation, and envy. This relationship varies according to the nature of the historical Chinese state (i.e., imperial [CMS recommends restricting Latin abbreviations to bibliographic references, glossaries, and other scholarly apparatus (including your endnotes); in body text, use English] state (that is, imperial, Republican, or Communist) as well as the nature of the Muslim community in question (defined by ethnicity and race, region, and language). A general thread from general trend was evident from the late imperial period to the modern nation-state that caused transformations to shari‘a in the era of the modern nation state, a trend that transformed shari‘a in the evolving and contingent co-existence of [again, as with "non," CMS 7.85, as well as Merriam Webster, contradicts MS Word's spellcheck function--and stipulates most "co-" prefixes to be closed up (no hyphen), except in compounds or for certain words that are likely to be misread, such as co-optation (but cooperative is closed up)] contingent coexistence of state law and Islamic law was the law: the gradual narrowing of shari‘a through of shari‘a through both discursive and institutional means. [Does my revision of the preceding sentence capture your intended meaning? (the text after the colon is what the trend, not the "thread," consists of)] During the transition from empire to nation, official to nation state, official discourse concerning shari‘a shaped the substance concerning shari‘a shaped its substance and procedures of shari‘a so that and its procedures, so that it became ‘custom’-like, religious became “custom”-like, religious without being political, and emphatically Chinese. Additionally, the Communists adapted a Communists adopted a number of Soviet–inspired institutions [hyphen, not en dash] of Soviet-inspired institutions and policies that survive to the present day. These institutions further day, institutions and policies that further marginalize shari‘a in marginalize shari‘a in the public sphere through legislation, “representative bodies,” and policy making. Wael Hallaq has observed that the rise of the nation-state has the nation state has led to the “structural demise” of shari‘a (Hallaq of shari‘a (Hallaq 2009, 500). The history of shari‘a in of shari‘a in China, however, is one of a long-term of long-term adaptation that preceded the adaptation well preceding the modern state. As a result, the effects ["result" and "effects" are redundant; is my revision OK?] state, an adaptation whose effects on Islamic law were more atrophy than amputation. The nation-state, particularly The nation state, particularly under socialist law and Communist policy, has nevertheless radically ["nevertheless" implies that the socialist, Communist nation state has done something other than the long-term trend of diminishing the strength of shari‘a, whereas your sentence describes a radical alteration of its viability; your present perfect tense ("has ... altered") implies a very gradual alteration, whereas "radically" seems to contradict that... my guess is that in 1949 and the very few years following (especially in the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution) a radical alteration took place. Therefore, the simple past ("altered") is better with "radically"] policy, radically altered the viability of shari‘a in of shari‘a in the everyday lives of Muslim minorities in China. Islamic China. An Islamic revival in reform in the reform period has also renewed interest in shari‘a, complicating in shari‘a, complicating the Party-State’s definition [New York Times style is "Party-state"] the Party-state’s definition of Islam. Shari‘a has a history in China Shari‘a has been in China for as long as Muslims have been in China, that China—that is, [it did not have a "history in China" all that time (it had to have been there for a while before it could have acquired a "history")] since the seventh century C.E., shortly century CE, since shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Following Muslims’ Following the Muslims’ accommodation to Chinese society, shari‘a underwent society, shari‘a underwent transformations in the transformations during the imperial period in its jurisdiction, substance and procedures, sources, and institutions. In addition, at various points, the state co-opted Muslim co-opted the Muslim elite into the Confucian bureaucracy. In the bureaucracy. During the modern era, new ideologies, including secularism, nationalism, and socialism, reinterpreted categories of difference such as law. ["categories of differences" is unclear to me; (1) can we delete the 5 words between "reinterpreted" and "law"? or (2) can you elaborate on these "categories of differences"?) or (3) do you mean something like: "... reinterpreted the ways that the law was applied to different groups" ?? and (4) in any case, consider inserting "the" before "law" in this sentence] From hierarchical From its hierarchical and vertical structures of law and government, the state designed a legal system that emphasized horizontal and homogenous institutions and homogeneous institutions under which citizens officially enjoyed equal rights. Yet at the same time, law based on citizenship normalized a new kind of hierarchy of difference based difference, one based on ethnicity. The current status of shari‘a in of shari‘a in the PRC is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a result of these broader reformations that are reformations, which are not without internal contradictions. The narrowing of shari‘a in of shari‘a in China is common to global is consistent with [or "is in line with"] global transformations during the early twentieth century, a period of Western colonization and the diffusion of techniques of colonial governance. Legal of colonial governance techniques. Legal reforms that straddled the end of the empire and the genesis of the modern nation-state borrowed modern nation state borrowed some of these techniques, namely, custom ["namely" implies a single technique] techniques—in particular, those exploiting custom. [right?] Whereas Western colonialists used custom for purposes of both everyday rule and to legitimate ‘superior’ colonial legitimate their “superior” colonial law in faraway colonies, the Chinese experience illustrates a domestic invocation of orientalism.2 The ‘customization’ of shari‘a not The “customization” of shari‘a not only further narrowed its scope, but scope but emptied it of many of its rules and institutions that could compete with state secular law. However, the long history of Muslims of the Muslims in China, the imperial state’s governance over Chinese Muslims, and the Chinese experience with nationalism distinguish the China case from the encounter of Western colonial powers with Islam. Shari‘a, recast Islam. Shari‘a, recast as ‘customary law’, became as “customary law,” became wedded to a particular Chinese concept of ethnicity through state institution building and official discourse, as part discourse. It became part of the construction of a modern of the modern China. The Transformation of Shari‘a in Chinese of Shari‘a in the Chinese Empire [I changed the vertical spacing here to bring your manuscript more in line with publishing practice. Before, there was an equal amount of space above the preceding heading as below it, to the text subsumed under that heading. Now there is slightly greater space above than below.] In the imperial period, as Chinese Muslims adapted to Chinese society and governance, shari‘a practice governance, shari‘a practice was increasingly relegated to private and familial matters. At periods matters. During some periods, namely during the Yuan Dynasty and during the and the Qing dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, the state used Islam and its law to govern Muslim populations. At different times, imperial times, however, imperial governance operated to marginalize, bureaucratize, and customize shari‘a. The customize shari‘a. The history of shari‘a in the of shari‘a during the imperial period hence parallels [is "hence" necessary before "parallels"? it implies that your readers are already well aware how Islamic law and state law interacted under the Russians, the Ottomans, and the British--and so the Chinese experience is paralleling something already well known--but is that likely to be the case? Without "hence," this sentence provides news to the reader (which is your intent, yes?), producing a reaction such as the following: Oh, I see! It was like that under the Russians, the Turks, and the Brits, too!] trajectories of Islamic and Islamic law and state law in the Russian and Ottoman Empires as well as British as under the British colonization of India and Malaysia. While the earliest ["While" (or "Though" or "Whereas") sets up two contrasting clauses--the earliest contacts were in the 4th century BCE versus there were growing communities during the Tang period--which is not the case here; your second sentence (I made it a separate sentence rather than the main clause of a single sentence) adds information to your first sentence (what you had as an introductory dependent clause beginning with "While"), not contradicts it] The earliest contacts between Chinese and Muslim communities and Mesopotamian communities [OK? there were no Muslims before the seventh century CE; "Near East" or "Middle East" would be an alternative to "Mesopotamian"] appear to have occurred overland through West Asia through Central Asia via Iran in the fourth century B.C.E., by the Tang century BCE. By the time of the early Tang Dynasty, there were growing Dynasty, during the initial expansion of Islam, [insertions OK? Islam started and rapidly expanded just as the Tang Dynasty was getting started] there were already growing communities of Arab and Persian traders, merchant, and traders, merchants, and envoys on the southeast coast. In what has become known as the “maritime Silk Road,” Muslim businessmen who purchased Chinese porcelain and silk took up residence in coastal cities.… 17 pages later (a few pages into a section under a different heading: "The Customization of Islamic Law") The Abstracts of the Record of the Civil and Commercial Affairs Customs Survey, hereinafter, “Abstracts,” select which Islamic rules to represent and record (and which to discard). The view that emerges from these few references to Muslim customs is that discard). From these few references to Muslim customs, it is possible to discern that Muslim minorities historically practiced Islamic laws of social relations (mu‘āmalāt). This area of the law provided guidance on such topics as polygyny, marriage and remarriage, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, and such life cycle events such life-cycle events as the wedding ceremony. Two points can be drawn from the extent of minority customs as recorded customs that were recorded in the customary law surveys the customary-law surveys in the late Qing and early Republic. First Republic periods. First, during this period, customary this time, customary law referred not to just not just to non-Han minorities, but to Han minorities but to the Han Chinese, too. With Chinese as well. With the exception of the customs excerpted above, the customs just excerpted, the vast majority of over 3,000 customs the more than three thousand customs recorded in the Abstracts were those of the Han. In accord with Chiang Kai-shek’s theory of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu), collective In accordance with the theory of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu), advanced by Chiang Kai-shek (in modern transliteration, Jiang Jieshi), [Change OK here? "Chiang Kai-shek" is a Wade-Giles spelling, "Jiang Jieshi" the pinyin, and you want pinyin transliterations throughout--but your American audience is familiar with the Wade-Giles spelling, so it makes sense to use it--but then to supply the pinyin as well] collective national identity was embedded in customary law of and for the nation. The Republican version of the custom survey was similar to the reconstruction of adat (tradition of adat (tradition, custom, social system, propriety in Dutch colonial law) in 1950s Indonesia. Supreme Indonesia. The country’s Supreme Court reconstructed codes of adat, initially of adat, initially written by Dutch by the Dutch colonialists, as blueprints for the post-revolutionary nation. By ‘nationalizing’ adat, the By “nationalizing” adat, the state sought to extend rules specific to local communities to extend local-community rules to the nation as a whole (Bowen 1988, 280). Second, although Islamic law is not a major field of investigation in the survey, it is named as is referred to as “Islamic custom” (huijiao xiguan). For perhaps the first time in official writings, Islamic law in China is labeled as custom. It is not conceived of as foreign as a foreign legal system or even the even as the local substantiation of a global religion with roots outside of China, but rather, it is a primordial affect of an indigenous Chinese group: “Huimin,” collectively, those who believe in Islam in China. The Record of the Civil and Commercial Affairs Customs Survey, hereinafter, “Record,” hereinafter, the “Record,” purports to provide a comprehensive and systematized index of customary law. Bourgon, however, has argued that due to variety of factors, including inconsistencies between survey instructions designed by officials in centralized bureaucracies and the actual survey results of the field workers caused workers—inconsistencies caused by the incongruity between the incongruity among the five German fields of law identified for survey inspection and the messy reality of customs on the ground, compounded ground, and compounded by lost or otherwise destroyed data, in terms of its principal goal, the project was in “a data—the project was, in terms of its principal goal, “a spectacular failure after two decades of patient efforts” (2005, 101).… 412 pages later Bibliography [(1) Why do you have the bibliographic references in a different typeface from the body text? (2) I am ensuring conformance with Chicago Manual author-date style in this list] Bourgon, Jérôme. 2005. "Rights, [see CMS 17.69 (15th edition, as specified by publisher for reference list--with noted exceptions): No quotations for contribution title in author-date reference lists] Freedoms, and Customs in the Making of Chinese Civil Law, 1900-1936". In Realms 2005. Rights, freedoms, and customs in the making of Chinese civil law, 1900–1936. [CMS stipulates en dash for date ranges] In Realms of Freedom in Modern China of freedom in modern China, ed. W. C. Kirby, 84-112. Stanford, Stanford Kirby, 84–112. [CMS stipulates en dash for page ranges] Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bowen, John R. 1988. The Transformation of an Indonesian Property System: Adat, Islam, and Social Change in the Gayo Highlands The transformation of an Indonesian property system: Adat, Islam, and social change in the Gayo highlands. American Ethnologist 15: 274-293 American Ethnologist 15:274–93. Chen, Li. 2010. Law & Sensibility of Empire in the Making of Modern China. Ph.D. Doctoral Dissertation, [see CMS 14.224 (16th edition, as specified by publisher for this rule) for dissertations] Columbia Law and sensibility of empire in the making of modern China. PhD. diss., Columbia University. Fei, Xiaotong. 1992[1947]. From [see CMS 15.38 (16th edition, as specified by publisher for this rule) for two dates] Xiaotong. [1947] 1992. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Berkeley, University the soil: The foundations of Chinese society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Granet, Marcel. 1934. La Pensée Chinoise. Paris, La La pensée chinoise. Paris: La Renaissane du Livre. Hallaq, Wael B. 2009. Sharī‘a: Sharī‘a: [since this is Hallaq's title, I am contradicting the decision in my earlier comment to abide by the IJMES word list and disregard the macron over the i...If Hallaq has it in the title, we need to keep it... (I did keep that letter in the same font, though, unlike the original here] Theory, Practice, Transformations Theory, practice, transformations. Cambridge, Cambridge Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hermes, Nizar F. 2013. "The 2013. The Orient's Medieval 'Orient'(alism)': The Orient’s medieval “orient(alism)”: The Riḥla of Sulaymān al-Tājir". In of Sulaymān al-Tājir. In Orientalism Revisted: Art, Land, and Voyage, ed. Orientalism revisted: Art, land, and voyage, ed. I. R. Netton, 207-222. Routledge, London and New York Netton, 207–22. London and New York: Routledge. Lie, John. 1996. Sociology of Contemporary Japan of contemporary Japan. Current Sociology 44 (1): 1-96 Current Sociology 44 (1): 1–96. Lubman, Stanley B. 1999. Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao a cage: Legal reform in China after Mao. Stanford, CA, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Peerenboom, Randall. 2002. China's Long March toward Rule of Law. Cambridge, Cambridge China’s long march toward rule of law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ruskola, Teemu. 2013. Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law. Cambridge, Harvard Legal orientalism: China, the United States, and modern law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schein, Louisa. 1997. Gender and Internal Orientalism in Gender and internal orientalism in China. Modern China 23 (1): 69-98 Modern China 23 (1): 69–98. Weber, Max. 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. New York, The Free Press. [again, see CMS 15.38 (16th edition, as specified by publisher for this rule) for works that have two dates; and in this case, the [1922] 1978 work gets listed first, since 1922 is earlier than 1951] ------. 1978[1922] Weber, Max. [1922] 1978. Economy and Society. 1. Berkeley, University Economy and society. 1. [Does the "1" indicate volume 1 of a multivolume work? Is the title just for that volume or for the entire group of volumes?] Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Max. 1951 ———. 1951. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. New York, The The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. New York: The Free Press. 2 pages later Endnotes 1 Recently, Li Chen has argued contra Ruskola that has contradicted Ruskola’s conclusion, arguing that Western thinkers from Montesquieu to William Blackstone saw in Chinese law a potential model for legal systems in the West (Chen 2010) (Chen 2010). 2 There is a broad literature that examines both Asian and Islamic self-representations based on pre-existing archetypes on preexisting archetypes and essentialisms, some of which were developed in the West. Scholars have called this process a number of names including names, including “auto Orientalism” (Lie 1996), “self-Orientalism” (Chu 2013), and “internal Orientalism” (Schein 1997).…

Result
The discrepancy with the "sun letters"—at-Tājir and ad-dara in the body text, al-Tājir and al-dara in the quoted passages and bibliography—was not a problem for the author (but a statement in the book's introduction acknowledging and justifying the apparent inconsistency is a good idea).
Click to go to the next sample in the series.

“Every town has a thing called al-dara. This is a bell placed near [lit. ‘at the head of’] the ruler of the town and is tied to a cord stretching as far as the road for the [benefit] of the common people.” If a person is wronged by another person, he/she shakes the cord that is linked to al-dara. When doing so, al-Tājir observes, “the bell near the ruler starts ringing. So he [the wronged] is allowed to enter [the palace] to relate personally what the matter is and to explain the wrong done to him” (Hermes 2013, 214). Thus, Sulaymān at-Tājir, the ninth-century Iranian merchant and author of Accounts of India and China (Akhbār aṣ-Ṣīn wa-l-Hind) depicts the access to justice in rural imperial China, based upon his observations of life in Guandong. However embellished at-Tājir’s account of the justice bell, or ad-dara (Ch. duo), may be, his description of law in China is very different from the earliest European and American assessments of Chinese law. According to Max Weber, Chinese religion made no distinction between ritual norms and legal proscriptions, an indiscrimination that impeded the rationalization of law as well as the emergence of a capitalist economy ([1922] 1978, 577; 1951, 147). Marcel Granet, student of Émile Durkheim, faulted Chinese thought for its lack of law, writing that “[t]he Chinese did not conceive the idea of Law” (1934, 341). Even Chinese scholars have internalized such views. Fei Xiaotong, one of the founders of modern social sciences in China, described Chinese society in terms of Gemeinschaft, or mechanical solidarity predicated on ritual and customs, and concluded about China that “there is no way for laws…to develop in rural society“ (Fei [1947] 1992, 43). One of the defining debates in the study of modern law has been whether China has an illiberal “rule of law” (Lubman 1999; Peerenboom 2002). As Edward Said and his followers have argued, the production of knowledge generates power relations between subject and object. According to Said, this fact is demonstrated by the history of orientalism, familiarized as the West viewing the East. Teemu Ruskola has argued that this perspective has defined the comparative study of law in China (2013).1 But what difference does it make, if any, when the East views the East? What epistemological potentials are presented by decentering the West’s monopoly on viewing other legal notions? At-Tājir’s observations illustrate one perspective of the “Near East ” viewing the “Far East.” In this book, I reverse the subject-object order to ask what can be learned about Islam and China (and indirectly, the West) through Chinese law’s perspective on shari‘a, or Islamic law. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which authoritarian China manages legal pluralism. Any attempt to address this question must consider the historical Chinese state’s view of Islamic law. The relationship between secular law and Islamic law assumes a variety of qualities—including recognition, nonrecognition, and misrecognition, valorization, transmutation, co-optation, competition, subordination, hegemony, manipulation, dependence, and envy. This relationship varies according to the nature of the historical Chinese state (that is, imperial, Republican, or Communist) as well as the nature of the Muslim community in question (defined by ethnicity and race, region, and language). A general trend was evident from the late imperial period to the era of the modern nation state, a trend that transformed shari‘a in the evolving and contingent coexistence of state law and Islamic law: the gradual narrowing of shari‘a through both discursive and institutional means. During the transition from empire to nation state, official discourse concerning shari‘a shaped its substance and its procedures, so that it became “custom”-like, religious without being political, and emphatically Chinese. Additionally, the Communists adopted a number of Soviet-inspired institutions and policies that survive to the present day, institutions and policies that further marginalize shari‘a in the public sphere through legislation, “representative bodies,” and policy making. Wael Hallaq has observed that the rise of the nation state has led to the “structural demise” of shari‘a (Hallaq 2009, 500). The history of shari‘a in China, however, is one of long-term adaptation well preceding the modern state, an adaptation whose effects on Islamic law were more atrophy than amputation. The nation state, particularly under socialist law and Communist policy, radically altered the viability of shari‘a in the everyday lives of Muslim minorities in China. An Islamic revival in the reform period has also renewed interest in shari‘a, complicating the Party-state’s definition of Islam. Shari‘a has been in China for as long as Muslims have been in China—that is, since the seventh century CE, since shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Following the Muslims’ accommodation to Chinese society, shari‘a underwent transformations during the imperial period in its jurisdiction, substance and procedures, sources, and institutions. In addition, at various points, the state co-opted the Muslim elite into the Confucian bureaucracy. During the modern era, new ideologies, including secularism, nationalism, and socialism, reinterpreted the ways that the law was applied to different groups. From its hierarchical and vertical structures of law and government, the state designed a legal system that emphasized horizontal and homogeneous institutions under which citizens officially enjoyed equal rights. Yet at the same time, law based on citizenship normalized a new kind of hierarchy of difference, one based on ethnicity. The current status of shari‘a in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a result of these broader reformations, which are not without internal contradictions. The narrowing of shari‘a in China is consistent with global transformations during the early twentieth century, a period of Western colonization and the diffusion of colonial governance techniques. Legal reforms that straddled the end of the empire and the genesis of the modern nation state borrowed some of these techniques—in particular, those exploiting custom. Whereas Western colonialists used custom for purposes of both everyday rule and to legitimate their “superior” colonial law in faraway colonies, the Chinese experience illustrates a domestic invocation of orientalism.2 The “customization” of shari‘a not only further narrowed its scope but emptied it of many of its rules and institutions that could compete with state secular law. However, the long history of the Muslims in China, the imperial state’s governance over Chinese Muslims, and the Chinese experience with nationalism distinguish the China case from the encounter of Western colonial powers with Islam. Shari‘a, recast as “customary law,” became wedded to a particular Chinese concept of ethnicity through state institution building and official discourse. It became part of the construction of the modern China. The Transformation of Shari‘a in the Chinese Empire In the imperial period, as Chinese Muslims adapted to Chinese society and governance, shari‘a practice was increasingly relegated to private and familial matters. During some periods, namely during the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, the state used Islam and its law to govern Muslim populations. At different times, however, imperial governance operated to marginalize, bureaucratize, and customize shari‘a. The history of shari‘a during the imperial period parallels trajectories of Islamic law and state law in the Russian and Ottoman Empires as well as under the British colonization of India and Malaysia. The earliest contacts between Chinese and Mesopotamian communities appear to have occurred overland through Central Asia via Iran in the fourth century BCE. By the time of the early Tang Dynasty, during the initial expansion of Islam, there were already growing communities of Arab and Persian traders, merchants, and envoys on the southeast coast. In what has become known as the “maritime Silk Road,” Muslim businessmen who purchased Chinese porcelain and silk took up residence in coastal cities.… 17 pages later (a few pages into a section under a different heading: "The Customization of Islamic Law") The Abstracts of the Record of the Civil and Commercial Affairs Customs Survey, hereinafter, “Abstracts,” select which Islamic rules to represent and record (and which to discard). From these few references to Muslim customs, it is possible to discern that Muslim minorities historically practiced Islamic laws of social relations (mu‘āmalāt). This area of the law provided guidance on such topics as polygyny, marriage and remarriage, guardianship, adoption, inheritance, and such life-cycle events as the wedding ceremony. Two points can be drawn from the extent of minority customs that were recorded in the customary-law surveys in the late Qing and early Republic periods. First, during this time, customary law referred not just to non-Han minorities but to the Han Chinese as well. With the exception of the customs just excerpted, the vast majority of the more than three thousand customs recorded in the Abstracts were those of the Han. In accordance with the theory of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu), advanced by Chiang Kai-shek (in modern transliteration, Jiang Jieshi), collective national identity was embedded in customary law of and for the nation. The Republican version of the custom survey was similar to the reconstruction of adat (tradition, custom, social system, propriety in Dutch colonial law) in 1950s Indonesia. The country’s Supreme Court reconstructed codes of adat, initially written by the Dutch colonialists, as blueprints for the post-revolutionary nation. By “nationalizing” adat, the state sought to extend local-community rules to the nation as a whole (Bowen 1988, 280). Second, although Islamic law is not a major field of investigation in the survey, it is referred to as “Islamic custom” (huijiao xiguan). For perhaps the first time in official writings, Islamic law in China is labeled as custom. It is not conceived of as a foreign legal system or even as the local substantiation of a global religion with roots outside of China, but rather, it is a primordial affect of an indigenous Chinese group: “Huimin,” collectively, those who believe in Islam in China. The Record of the Civil and Commercial Affairs Customs Survey, hereinafter, the “Record,” purports to provide a comprehensive and systematized index of customary law. Bourgon, however, has argued that due to variety of factors, including inconsistencies between survey instructions designed by officials in centralized bureaucracies and the actual survey results of the field workers—inconsistencies caused by the incongruity among the five German fields of law identified for survey inspection and the messy reality of customs on the ground, and compounded by lost or otherwise destroyed data—the project was, in terms of its principal goal, “a spectacular failure after two decades of patient efforts” (2005, 101). 412 pages later Bibliography Bourgon, Jérôme. 2005. Rights, freedoms, and customs in the making of Chinese civil law, 1900–1936. In Realms of freedom in modern China, ed. W. C. Kirby, 84–112. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bowen, John R. 1988. The transformation of an Indonesian property system: Adat, Islam, and social change in the Gayo highlands. American Ethnologist 15:274–93. Chen, Li. 2010. Law and sensibility of empire in the making of modern China. PhD. diss., Columbia University. Fei, Xiaotong. [1947] 1992. From the soil: The foundations of Chinese society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Granet, Marcel. 1934. La pensée chinoise. Paris: La Renaissane du Livre. Hallaq, Wael B. 2009. Sharī‘a: Theory, practice, transformations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hermes, Nizar F. The Orient’s medieval “orient(alism)”: The Riḥla of Sulaymān al-Tājir. In Orientalism revisted: Art, land, and voyage, ed. I. R. Netton, 207–22. London and New York: Routledge. Lie, John. 1996. Sociology of contemporary Japan. Current Sociology 44 (1): 1–96. Lubman, Stanley B. 1999. Bird in a cage: Legal reform in China after Mao. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Peerenboom, Randall. 2002. China’s long march toward rule of law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ruskola, Teemu. 2013. Legal orientalism: China, the United States, and modern law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schein, Louisa. 1997. Gender and internal orientalism in China. Modern China 23 (1): 69–98. Weber, Max. [1922] 1978. Economy and society. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1951. The religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. New York: The Free Press. 2 pages later Endnotes 1 Recently, Li Chen has contradicted Ruskola’s conclusion, arguing that Western thinkers from Montesquieu to William Blackstone saw in Chinese law a potential model for legal systems in the West (Chen 2010). 2 There is a broad literature that examines both Asian and Islamic self-representations based on preexisting archetypes and essentialisms, some of which were developed in the West. Scholars have called this process a number of names, including “auto Orientalism” (Lie 1996), “self-Orientalism” (Chu 2013), and “internal Orientalism” (Schein 1997).…