RELIGIOUS COURTS, ISLAMIC LAW AND JUDICIAL REFORM Sample Clauses

RELIGIOUS COURTS, ISLAMIC LAW AND JUDICIAL REFORM. The existence of religious courts reflects dimensions of struggle over Islam and particularly over Islamic law in Indonesia. Although it is too simplistic to assess this struggle from the standpoint of religious courts alone, the dynamics of religious courts—their changing status, their extending and/or dwindling domain, and the transmutation of the state’s substantive law—help to elucidate the relationship between the state and Islam on one hand and the state’s efforts to appropriate Islamic law within the Indonesian context on the other. Both the colonial rulers and the modern nation-state of Indonesia faced numerous questions regarding the proper place of Islam and its institutions. For both, the question has been how to properly position Islam and to what extent Islamic norms should be accepted and practiced. These questions affect the religious courts since the courts are considered as the expression of Islamic power and authority. The modern Islamic struggle is very much concerned with which version of Islamic law should be applied in religious courts. Modernist Muslims tend to adopt reformed Xxxxx’a law while the traditionalists prefer classical Islamic law (fiqh), as it was developed by classical- medieval Muslim jurists. Muslim women activists strive to introduce reformed Islamic law imbued with a spirit of gender justice and the eradication or moderation of patriarchal elements in fiqh. However, neither modernists nor traditionalists nor Muslim women activists, but the state determines the extent to which Islamic law can be accepted at court. The failure of two recently proposed reforms of Islamic family law, namely the Counter Legal Draft to the Compilation of Islamic Law of 2004 and the Muslim Marriage Law Bill of 2008, constitute discursive battles among Muslims and the state as to how to define Islamic law. The failure of these reforms affirms that the old traditionalist paradigm, enshrined in fiqh, has not totally vanished. The competence of Indonesian religious courts in the period of the Islamic kingdoms (from the middle of fifteenth through eighteenth century) covered a wide jurisdiction but diminished gradually after the Dutch imposed their control over them in 1882. The colonial regime marginalized Islamic courts and made them subservient to the civil courts in 1937, and this situation continued up to and through Indonesian independence. Only after the issuance of the Religious Judicature Act 7/1989 did religious courts achieve an equal...