Shariʿa and Social Engineering

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Abstract This book presents a richly-textured critical examination of the day-to-day workings of one of the contemporary world’s most complex experiments with the state implementation of Islamic law in the context of massive post-disaster/post-conflict projects for social reconstruction. It argues for new attention to be paid to the ways in which contemporary projects for the implementation of Islamic law are future-oriented, and thus argues for revising widely-held views that characterize contemporary calls for the Shariʿa as either utopian attempts to return to a past ‘golden age’ of Islam, or as manifestations of identity politics in an age of globalization. Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic data, it examines the ways in which Muslim academics and Indonesian state officials in Aceh have conceived of state implementation of Islamic law as a project of social engineering. The emphasis is on the ways in which the ideals and institutions of advocates of Islamic law in contemporary Aceh are configured in relation to a range of non-Muslim modernist projects to employ law as a tool of social engineering. In doing so, this work demonstrates the links between a local project for the formal implementation of Islamic law and broader configurations of law, moral authority, and state power in the modern global order.