Problems of Sharia in the intellectual discourse of modern Indonesian society

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to analyse the problems of Sharia law and Shariatization of law in modern Indonesian society. The novelty of the study lies in the analysis of the problems of Shariatization of Indonesian society, which remain understudied in modern Russian historiography. Methodologically, the article is based on the principles proposed in the new social history, which allows to investigate the phenomenon of Shariatization through the prism of societal reaction to forced modernization, stimulat-ing the growth of contradictions between Sharia as part of the traditional political and legal culture and the norms transplanted from the West into the secular development model. The article analyses 1) the issue of correlation between secular and religious law in Indonesia, 2) the development of the phenom-enon of legal parallelism in Indonesia, which emerged as a consequence of the limited implementation of Sharia norms in legal and political practices, 3) identifying the role of universities as the main intel-lectual centres that actualise and accumulate public demand for Sharia law in Indonesian society. It is assumed that, in Indonesia, legal parallelism based on the simultaneous and parallel co-development of secular law and Sharia law emerged and developed. The article shows that 1) political modernisation and the construction of Indonesia as a secular state did not lead to a significant weakening of Muslim legal traditions, 2) the limited application of Sharia is recognised by Muslim intellectuals and devel-oped as the ijtihad, focused on the academic study of Sharia, 3) discussions about Sharia and its place in legal practices are localised at the level of the university community, which determines the moderate nature of public perception of the problems and prospects of Shariatization.