Southeast Asia has the world's largest Muslim population - Indonesia alone is home to more Muslims than the entire Middle East - yet nowhere in the region has a theocratic government emerged. Instead, Southeast Asian Islam is characterized by heterodox local traditions. Muslim societies today are torn between radical Islamist reformers calling for Shari'ah law and secular governments using law to contain and co-opt it. The result is a tension between state laws and institutions and Islamic alternatives. These three volumes provide an up-to-date, expert account of this complex contest across contemporary Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei in a comprehensive form not attempted for decades, including coverage on a range of areas including legal doctrine, substantive laws, judicial decision-making, the administration of religion, intellectual debate, and state policy developments.
A thorough and detailed survey of Islam and the law in Indonesia today is long overdue. This volume offers an expert and systematic update of the interaction of Islam and positive law (substantive regulations and institutions) in contemporary Indonesia, where Islamic law has developed within a state-approved and secularizing bureaucratic structure that valorized local traditions over the scriptures of Islam. Successive governments have sought to integrate Islam into the framework of a secular national ideology, albeit in contested form, with constant ideological debates over relevance and content. The result is an increasingly complex mixture of local traditions and norms and state secularism, with growing social and political pressure for an orthodoxy modeled more closely on Arab cultures. Based on extensive fieldwork, this volume gives a detailed account of current debates, legal institutions, and substantive laws, explicitly asking whether a uniquely Indonesian approach to Shari'ah can be identified, as many local Muslim leaders have long argued is the case.
The current Syrian crisis has its roots in the sectarian nature of the country's multi-religious society. Since Ottoman times, the different religious communities have enjoyed the right to regulate and administer their own family relations. Matters of personal status including marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance continue to be managed by a variety of religious laws and courts operating simultaneously within the legal system of the state. However, this complex system of competing jurisdictions has also affected inter-communal relations and has been used to deepen communal divides. Esther van Eijk discusses socio-legal practices in Syria by focusing on three courts: a shar?iyya, a Catholic court and a Greek-Orthodox court
The public/private distinction is fundamental to modern theories of the family, religion and religious freedom, and state power, yet it has different salience, and is understood differently, from place to place and time to time. The volume examines the public/private distinction in the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The volume examines the public/private distinction in the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
