5 - The Religious Courts

Summary

In this chapter, I will reflect on Lev’s analysis of the political dimensions of Indonesia’s Islamic courts system. As a postscript in his last chapter of his book Islamic courts in Indonesia, Lev looks into the question of what consequences of political developments in 1971 might have for the future of the Islamic courts. According to Lev, a dual legal system consisting of ‘civil and religious legal systems reflect competing political principles and sources of legitimacy that cannot be tolerated for long’. Lev predicted in 1971 that the civil legal system in ‘one form or another’ would attempt to subjugate Islamic institutions to overriding principles of state legitimacy and bureaucratic integrity, but that the result of this process would be uncertain and dependent on the development of the religious–social–political cleavage in Indonesia. Below I will argue that a convergence between the civil and religious legal systems took place after 1971, but that this was not the result of subjugation of religious law by the civil legal system, but of an increased fusion of the civil and the religious pillars within Indonesia’s religious, social, political and legal domains.