Chapter 9 - Sharia, State and Legal Pluralism in Indonesia: How Law Can You Go?

Summary

M.B. Hooker has produced at least two important books on Islamic law in Indonesia: Indonesian Islam: Social Change through Contemporary Fatawa (2003) and Indonesian Syariah: Defining a National School of Islamic Law (2008). The two books demonstrate how Islam and sharia in Indonesia are understood and practised in a different way compared with the Middle East and other regions. Hooker offers his critical reviews of the method and application of fatwas, along with his evaluation of many different public faces of sharia from tertiary curricula, the Friday sermon in mosques, and a bureaucratic form of conducting the hajj, to the debates on public morality. Hooker's books show how elusive is the meaning of sharia in contemporary Indonesia.

My chapter considers some of Hooker's findings and focuses on how the issue of sharia is placed in the context of Indonesian law reform. As Hooker observed, until the early 1990s, “the status of Syariah in the Indonesian legal system was much as the Dutch had left it”. But things changed after the Soeharto era. The topic of sharia and pluralism in Indonesia is a complex arrangement of legal and public reasoning, moral practice, and political authority. There is understandable anxiety about the role of religion in public life, and Indonesian society's attempts to inculcate the values of respect, tolerance and pluralism. The main question is: Does legal pluralism still have a place in Indonesian Islam? My chapter examines the Indonesian experience as a vehicle to answer these questions. Among other things, I argue that Indonesia should be seen as a laboratory for legal pluralism, where state law coexists with sharia in legal postulates, official and unofficial laws.

Law Reform

The issue here is the unfinished discussion on religion, state and pluralism after the Soeharto era: how a state should, at the same time, accommodate and restrict the emergence of sharia into public life? If a state law was proposed and inspired by a particular rule from a particular religion, through public reasoning, would this situation damage the principle of state neutrality? Law and religion are entwined in the constitutional foundations of nations.