'Islam and Laws in Southeast Asia' Book Series
A book series on 'Islam and Laws in Southeast Asia' will be published by I.B. Tauris as part of the ARC Federation Fellowship:
- Islam and Laws in Singapore: Laws, Legal Institutions and the Muslim Minority, by Tim Lindsey and Kerstin Steiner
- Islam and Laws in Malaysia and Brunei: Laws, Legal Institutions and the Anglo-Malay Madhhab, by Tim Lindsey and Kerstin Steiner
- The New Jihad in Southeast Asia: From Darul Islam to Jemaah Islamiyah, by Tim Lindsey and Noor Huda Ismail
Southeast Asia has the world's largest Muslim population and Indonesia, its largest state, is home to more Muslims than the entire Middle East. Yet Indonesia - like many of its neighbours - is an avowedly secular state and nowhere in the region has a theocratic government emerged. Instead, Southeast Asian Islam has historically been characterised more by heterodox local traditions than Arab culture, although there are now significant pressures for the region to join the Muslim mainstream.
Islam has been described as a religion expressed in legal terms and today Southeast Asian Muslims find themselves torn between radical Islamist reformers seeking to implement Syari'ah law and secular governments that use law to contain and co-opt it. The result is a complex and diverse contest between state laws and Islamic alternatives that spans regulations, institutions and ideology.
Drawing on extensive new research and fieldwork, these three volumes provide an up-to-date account of the interaction of Islamic legal traditions and modern laws across contemporary Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei, in a comprehensive and detailed form not attempted for several decades. In systematic way that allows for country comparison, the volumes cover areas as diverse as legal doctrine, substantive laws, judicial decision-making, the administration of religion, intellectual debate, state policy development and an extensive range of selected case studies, including:
- Constitutional treatment of Islam;
- Islam and the courts, including division of jurisdiction between secular and religious courts and the structure and content of decisions;
- the decisive institutions of Islamic tradition (fatawa, ulama councils);
- criminal law (including hudud);
- civil law and commercial law (banking, contracts, insurance, almsgiving (zakat), endowment (wakaf));
- the bureaucratic administration of Islamic laws;
- family law (marriage and divorce, polygamy, inheritance);
- the status of women (sexuality, dress codes);
- moral regulation (proximity, social behaviour, ritual and public piety);
- political and socio-legal issues such as education, freedom of religion, legal regulation of places of worship, relations with Christians and other religions; and
- conservative Muslim political parties and militant Muslim groups.