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Since the 1960s, the shari'a has been equated with belligerent calls for the establishment of Islamic states. One effect of such "global shari'a‐phobia" is the growth of alarmist coverage of Islamic penal law (hudud). Indonesia and Malaysia, which jointly form the home of the largest Muslim population in the world, has witnessed constitutionalization, nationalization, and localization of the shari'a amidst fierce resistance by secular forces. This article examines the ideas of one active Southeast Asian participant in discussions over the shari'a ‐ the late Ahmad Ibrahim (1916‐1999). A legal practitioner, scholar, and social activist, he lived through the key phases of shari'a activism in the Muslim world. In this article, I argue that Ahmad Ibrahim sought to rehabilitate the shari'a, that is, he viewed the shari'a as a legal and ethical code needing of a thorough reinterpretation and repositioning in order to make it applicable for all citizens in modern nation‐states. Rehabilitating the shari'a entailed underlining three modalities of reforms: historicization, amplification, and harmonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contestation over the meaning and uses of shari’a (Islamic Law) in South Sulawesi Indonesia. Its purpose is to shed light upon the importance and limits of shari’a discursive argumentation in Muslim life, and to examine how shari’a is used in contemporary sociocultural and political processes. The escalation of shari’a formalisation after democratization in Indonesia has widely gained scholarly attention. While the existing literature largely focuses on shari’a politics and the shari’a of the elites, this article focuses on the anthropology of the shari’a politics and the varied usage of shari’a in sociocultural processes across different social assemblages. The research was conducted in Bulukumba, a district divided by the initiative for the formalisation of shari’a at district level. The study reveals that Muslims engage and imagine the shari’a in strikingly different ways, many of which are not at all discursive in a manner consistent with fiqh or scholarly legal commentaries. Discursive argumentation is not the only source of authority in Islamic community. It is a point in a vast network of relationships. The experiences of ordinary Muslims in South Sulawesi illuminate that discursive argumentation can be a less direct and less explicit tool than ritualisation to resist shari’ahisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The democratization of politics has been accompanied by a rise of Islamic laws in many Muslimmajority countries. Despite a growing interest in the phenomenon, the Islamization of politics in democratizing Muslim-majority countries is rarely understood as a process that unfolds across space and time. Based on an original dataset established during years of field research in Indonesia, this article analyzes the spread of shari'a regulations across the world's largest Muslim-majority democracy since 1998. The article shows that shari'a regulations in Indonesia diffused unevenly across space and time. Explanations put forward in the literature on the diffusion of morality policies in other countries such as geographic proximity, institutions, intergovernmental relations and economic conditions did not explain the patterns in the diffusion of shari'a regulations in Indonesia well. Instead, shari'a regulations in Indonesia were most likely to spread across jurisdictions where local Islamist groups situated outside the party system had an established presence. In short, the Islamization of politics was highly contingent on local conditions. Future research will need to pay more attention to local Islamist activists and networks situated outside formal politics as potential causes for the diffusion of shari'a law in democratizing Muslim-majority countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research in Indonesia in 2010-2013, this essay explains how Muslims expect norms of Islamic law to mobilize religious response to environmental crisis. It surveys attempts since the 1990s to develop "environmental fiqh (Muslim jurisprudence)" in Indonesia, justified in theory by rationales such as that actions causing environmental harm stem ultimately from human moral failing, and also that human aims and activities, including those protected by Islamic law, require a healthy biosphere. Many Indonesians expect Islamic ecological rulings to fill a critical gap in global persuasion, and to be successful when other (non-religious) environmental messages fail. Considering several key fatwas (non-binding legal opinions given in answer to a question) from the local level to the national in Indonesia, this paper explains how law and "outreach" (Ind. dakwah) come together to cast Islamic law of the environment in terms of foundational causes and ultimate effects. These religious norms coexist with and complement other globalized constructions (such as those of the nation-state and NGOS) that they increasingly incorporate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars of the Islamic revival have devoted attention to the increased prominence of Islamic law [the shari'a] in the once-secular public sphere, less attention has been paid to a countervailing trend. By mapping the evolution of Islamic law over the twentieth century, the author demonstrates that the shari'a is a product of decades of negotiations between Islamic institutions and more secular authorities including government ministers, doctors and social movements. This evolution suggests that secular authority and secular forms of knowledge have influenced but not displaced religious authority and religious forms of knowledge. The opposite is also true. This finding raises questions about the binary distinction between secular and sacred authority and suggests the coevolution of religion and secularism in modern Muslim societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority country in the word, issues of religion-state relations have long loomed large, in part because of zig-zag shifts in this country's politics and associated challenges for religious tolerance, social freedoms, and citizenship. Although it is only in the past decade that research on Indonesia has been explicitly reframed in relation to religious freedom, issues directly relevant to the topic have long figured in studies of Indonesian politics, constitutionalism, and religious violence. The significance of this research lies in the way in which it shows that research must take into account competing models of human flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions figure prominently in explanations for why radical parties forego their agendas and subject themselves to democratic principles when included in politics. Analyzing the Prosperous Justice Party’s political trajectory across Indonesia’s multi-level government structures between 1999 and 2009, I show that the Islamist party has gradually adopted more moderate behavior not only in national politics, where institutional incentives are conducive to moderation, but also in local politics, where institutional incentives for moderation are weaker. The absence of a strong pattern of invariant association between institutional incentives and the moderation of party behavior points to the importance of party internal mechanisms in moderation processes. Based on primary sources and in-depth interviews with party members, I argue that socio-structural factors shape a party's internal power dynamics and thereby its long-term capacity to adopt more moderate behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]