Introduction

Traditionally, zakat is an alms tax required of individual Muslims. Corporate zakat extends that alms obligation to business entities such as corporations. Treating corporations as subject to zakat obligation is unprecedented in Islamic law. The Indonesian context as neither secular nor Islamic state poses numerous challenges in creating such an Islamic legal norm and then incorporating it into a statute. Interestingly, the practice of paying corporate zakat has been observed by some companies in Indonesia, despite its ambiguous status in both Islamic jurisprudence and Indonesian law. This chapter provides the readers with the theoretical and conceptual background of this book. Employing law and society as the lens, it tells the readers gaps created by previous studies and why the issues of sharīʻa interpretation, imposition, and compliance in corporate zakat obligation matter to investigate to understand the role of Islamic law in Indonesia.