Call for Papers

The Indonesian Journal of Islamic Law (IJIL) invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to contribute to a thematic issue entitled “Decolonising Islamic Law: Rethinking Authority, Knowledge, and Legal Reform in the Global South.” This issue seeks to advance critical and empirically grounded discussions on how colonial and postcolonial legacies have shaped the epistemology, institutions, and practices of Islamic law across Muslim societies, particularly in Southeast Asia and other regions of the Global South.

While Islamic law has often been framed through Eurocentric legal paradigms and state-centric models inherited from colonial governance, contemporary socio-legal realities demand a re-examination of legal authority, knowledge production, and reform from within lived Muslim contexts. This thematic issue encourages contributions that interrogate the intersections between Sharīʿah, state law, customary norms, and global legal discourses, and that explore how Islamic legal thought can be rearticulated as a dynamic, ethical, and transformative framework responsive to social justice, public welfare (maṣlaḥah), and plural legal orders.

IJIL particularly welcomes interdisciplinary approaches employing socio-legal analysis, qualitative fieldwork, ethnography, comparative doctrinal study, and critical legal theory to illuminate how Islamic law is negotiated, contested, and reconstructed in postcolonial settings. By centering perspectives from the Global South, this issue aims to reposition Islamic law not merely as an object of regulation, but as a living normative system capable of contributing original theoretical insights to global debates on law, governance, and social transformation.