Kafa’ah among the Hadrami Arabs in the Malay World (Anthropology of Law Approach)

Abstract

This article explores how Hadrami Arabs have been maintaining the law of kafa’ah marriage or endogamy marriage in the Malay world—in this instance Indonesia and Malaysia and, to some extent, Singapore—from the early 1990s to the present. Arabs, mostly of Hadrami descent, are carrying their traditions everywhere in their diaspora. Moreover, those traditions are related to the Islamic law of endogamy marriage. This study employs a qualitative research method. Library research is used in collecting data, published or unpublished documents. Data sources are done with a web search using the following databases: Google Scholar, Ebsco-host, Research gate, Sage Journal, Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), and others. The results and discussion of the research explain that the process of the establishment of the tradition of endogamy marriage has begun since their existence in Hadramaut to preserve offspring, because they became the target of the murder of the Umayyad dynasty. In Hadramaut, they established Naqabah Asyraf Kubra, which served to record the genealogy and maintain the Syarifah ((female descendants of Prophet Muhammad) in order to obey the law of endogamy marriage. On the other hand, this paper will also examine issues related to the existence of the Arab’s community diaspora in the state order in the legal perspective reviewed from the guarantee of its legal certainty. The conclusion in this study is that in the end the issue of Syarifah marriage with this akhwal depends very much on the perspective of the community either from Alawiyyin group or not. Rigid attitudes towards traditions supported by religious propositions will still be able to preserve this. However, how big is the tradition of the law of endogamy marriage able to withstand the onslaught of globalization and modernization that continues to run, because some Syarifah groups question and even break out of or disobey this tradition.