ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a research design to study legal geographies in Indonesia needs to engage specifically with the role of Islam and its impact on law-making and implementation. The need to explore the role of Islam stems from its growing importance in Indonesia’s public realm: the values and norms of Islam increasingly provide bases for processes of legal drafting and reshaping important customary law (adat). Nationally, Muslim leaders must be consulted informally or formally during or after legal drafting, and members of the judiciary are expected to have studied at specific universities, such as the International Islamic University Malaysia. Locally, Muslim leaders are often legitimised via adat to influence or even shape the regulation of community affairs. While adat often is considered as a kind of place-based regulation of social matters, religious law or Islamic law is subject to negotiation between colonial, post-colonial, religious and local elites as they struggle for the codification of particular readings of Islam into law and its implementation, which is also known as “politics of Islamic law” (Hussin, 2016). The chapter provides the background to the politics of Islam, explores how these can be traced in publicly accessible sources and reflects on the research design.
