Call for Papers Islamic Law in Motion: Institutions, Authority, and Social Transformation after Decolonial Critique

The Indonesian Journal of Islamic Law (IJIL) invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to contribute to a thematic issue entitled “Islamic Law in Motion: Institutions, Authority, and Social Transformation after Decolonial Critique". This issue seeks theoretically informed and empirically grounded studies examining how Islamic law is interpreted, institutionalised, contested, and transformed across Muslim societies, particularly in Southeast Asia and the wider Global South.

Decolonial scholarship has made an important contribution by exposing how colonial power shaped legal knowledge, institutional hierarchies, categories of religious authority, and the modern administration of Islamic law. Yet critique alone does not fully explain how Islamic law operates within contemporary societies. This thematic issue therefore moves beyond the identification of colonial legacies to investigate what happens after decolonial critique: how legal actors respond to inherited structures, how institutions reorganise religious normativity, and how communities negotiate Islamic law amid changing social, political, and economic conditions.

The expression “Islamic law in motion” refers to Islamic law not as a fixed doctrinal corpus, but as a living field of legal reasoning, institutional practice, and social negotiation. Islamic law acquires meaning through the work of courts, fatwa institutions, state agencies, religious scholars, family networks, professional organisations, civil society groups, and local communities. These actors do not merely apply established rules. They interpret texts, construct legal authority, resolve competing claims, accommodate social change, and determine which forms of Islamic normativity gain recognition in particular contexts.

This thematic issue is especially concerned with the institutional sites through which Islamic law is produced and practised. Contributions may examine religious courts, family-law administrations, fatwa councils, mosques, pesantren and madrasas, zakat and waqf institutions, Islamic financial bodies, customary forums, community-based dispute-resolution mechanisms, and emerging digital spaces of religious authority. Studies should demonstrate how these institutions shape legal meaning, distribute authority, and mediate relations between Islamic norms, state law, customary practices, and transnational legal discourses.

Authority constitutes a second central concern. Rather than treating religious authority as a stable possession of particular scholars or institutions, this issue invites analysis of how authority is claimed, negotiated, challenged, and transferred. Relevant questions include how judges, muftis, religious leaders, bureaucrats, activists, experts, women’s organisations, and digital preachers establish legal credibility; how institutional legitimacy is maintained or contested; and how new actors enter fields previously dominated by established religious authorities. Particular attention may be given to the role of gender, class, generation, ethnicity, sectarian affiliation, professional expertise, and digital media in reshaping Islamic legal authority.

The issue also examines the relationship between Islamic law and social transformation. Contributions should explore how legal reasoning and institutional practice respond to concrete social problems rather than discussing reform only at an abstract or doctrinal level. These problems may include changes in marriage and family relations, gender justice, children’s rights, migration, religious diversity, economic inequality, environmental harm, public health, technological change, digital transactions, social welfare, and access to justice. Authors are encouraged to investigate not only whether Islamic law changes, but also how change occurs, who promotes or resists it, and what consequences it produces for individuals, institutions, and communities.

The phrase “after decolonial critique” does not imply that coloniality has disappeared or that decolonisation has been completed. It marks an analytical shift from critique towards empirical investigation and institutional reconstruction. The issue asks how Muslim societies engage colonial legal inheritances without reducing contemporary legal developments to colonial influence alone. It also invites critical examination of whether appeals to tradition, authenticity, indigeneity, or the Global South generate more equitable legal arrangements or reproduce internal hierarchies, exclusions, and unequal relations of power.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Islamic law in courts, bureaucracies, and public institutions;

• religious authority and institutional legitimacy;

• fatwas, legal opinions, and changing structures of iftāʾ;

• family law, marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child protection;

• gender, legal agency, and access to justice;

• legal pluralism and relations between Islamic, state, and customary law;

• pesantren, mosques, and community-based legal practices;

• informal justice and alternative dispute resolution;

• zakat, waqf, Islamic finance, and institutional accountability;

• Islamic law, environmental governance, and ecological justice;

• migration, citizenship, minorities, and transnational Muslim communities;

• digital religious authority, artificial intelligence, and online legal discourse;

• social movements, legal activism, and Islamic legal reform;

• postcolonial institutions and the continuing effects of colonial legal administration;

• comparative studies of Islamic legal institutions in the Global South.

IJIL particularly welcomes contributions based on original empirical research. Suitable approaches include socio-legal studies, qualitative fieldwork, ethnography, legal anthropology, institutional analysis, judicial decision analysis, archival research, comparative legal study, and historically grounded investigation. Conceptual and doctrinal contributions may also be considered where they engage a clearly defined legal problem, institutional setting, body of primary sources, or empirical case.

Authors should avoid treating decolonisation merely as a rhetorical vocabulary or presenting Islamic law as an inherently unified, authentic, or emancipatory tradition. Submissions are expected to identify the actors, institutions, practices, and power relations through which Islamic law becomes socially effective. They should also explain how the case under examination contributes to broader debates concerning legal authority, institutional change, legal pluralism, and socio-legal transformation.

By centring empirically grounded perspectives from Southeast Asia and the wider Global South, this thematic issue aims to develop a more precise understanding of Islamic law as a dynamic institutional and social phenomenon. It seeks contributions that demonstrate not simply what Islamic law prescribes but how it moves across institutions, between legal orders, through competing claims of authority, and in response to the changing realities of Muslim societies.