Legal diglossia, lexical borrowing and mixed juridical systems in early Islamic Java and Sumatra

Abstract

Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, Sumatra and Java gradually shifted from a Hindu-influenced socio-political landscape to one based on Islam. This chapter examines the changes and continuities of this transition through legal terminology. It demonstrates on the basis of lexical and socio-linguistic evidence that the so-called “Hindu period” and “Muslim period” coincided for centuries and that contacts between South and South-East Asia remained strong under Muslim rulers, yielding mixed legal systems in which Śāstric legal practices, Islamic fiqh, and customary law coexisted. A closer reading of pre-modern Indonesian lawbooks reveals that Sanskrit, Arabic, and other cosmopolitan languages were often used to validate and authorise local-level administrations of law. This was also the case for the practices of swearing, cursing and oath-taking, both in Hindu and Muslim settings. Such instances of legal diglossia – in which local languages are subordinated to more cosmopolitan ones – corroborate notions of a Sanskrit Cosmopolis, which was gradually replaced by an Arabic Cosmopolis across South and South-East Asia. However, we propose that languages such as Persian, Hindustani, and Tamil should also be taken into account when examining the pre-modern legal landscapes of western Indonesia.