Debating the Sociology of Sharia: A Critical Review of Legal Pluralism in Contemporary Muslim Societies
Abstract
This article critically examines The Sociology of Shari'a: Case Studies from Around the World (2nd ed., 2023), assessing how its comparative contributions advance the sociology of Sharia through the framework of legal pluralism. The volume explores how Islamic norms interact with state law, customary practices, and other normative orders across Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. This review acknowledges its comparative value while arguing that the conceptual foundations of legal pluralism require further scrutiny. It develops three critical interventions. First, it questions the uncertain boundary between law and social norms, which risks weakening legal pluralism’s analytical distinctiveness. Second, it examines the structural tension between dispersed legal authority in premodern Islamic traditions and the centralized sovereignty of the modern state. Third, it highlights the need for a decolonial perspective that considers how colonial knowledge and governance shaped the classification and institutionalization of Islamic law, customary law, and state law. Beyond these conceptual concerns, the review identifies limitations in the volume’s comparative framework, particularly regarding the consistency of its analytical categories, the integration of gender perspectives, and the depth of engagement with historical and political contexts. It argues that a more robust sociology of Sharia requires moving beyond descriptive accounts of normative diversity toward a critical examination of how legal authority is constructed, negotiated, and contested across different social and political settings.
Keywords
sociology of sharia
legal pluralism
Islamic law
Islam-state relations
Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries
Copyright
Copyright Holder: Lukman Santoso
Copyright Year: 2026
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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How to Cite
Debating the Sociology of Sharia: A Critical Review of Legal Pluralism in Contemporary Muslim Societies. (2026). Contemporary Fiqh Studies, 1(2), 222–235. https://doi.org/10.66277/cfs.v1i2.456
