This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

This chapter explores a 2012 legal opinion (fatwā) of the MUI—the Indonesian Ulama Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) empowered by President Suharto in 1975 to serve as a semi-official religious authority—on the Shīʿī preacher Tajul Muluk, operating in Sampang (East Java). The fatwā comments on the distinctive legal and theological doctrines of the Twelver Shīʿa generally, which are found wanting. The authors emphasise the collective probity of the Prophet’s Companions (ṣaḥāba), the illegitimacy of temporary marriage (mutʿa) and the legitimacy of tarāwīḥ prayer in Ramaḍān, among other issues, and cite a large number of premodern Sunnī theologians and jurists to argue that the Twelver Shīʿa are guilty of unbelief (kufr). They hold that Tajul Muluk must thus be prosecuted, not under the legal norms associated with apostasy (ridda) in the Islamic legal tradition, but with ‘blasphemy against Islam’ as defined in Indonesian state law.