Domestic Violence and Women's Protection in Indonesian Islamic Family Law: A Postcolonial Perspective on Strengthening Women's Rights

Abstract

Domestic violence against women remains a persistent problem within contemporary Muslim families, even though Islamic family law normatively upholds justice, compassion, and human dignity. This article examines domestic violence and women’s protection in Islamic family law through a postcolonial lens, aiming to expose the power relations, patriarchal bias, and colonial legacies shaping the formation and practice of family law, without altering the normative commitments Islam itself articulates. Employing normative legal research with a conceptual approach informed critically by postcolonial theory as an interpretive framework, this study analyzes primary legal materials, Law No. 23 of 2004 on the Elimination of Domestic Violence, the 1974 Marriage Law, and the Compilation of Islamic Law, alongside classical fiqh texts, religious court decisions, and recent scholarship. The findings show that domestic violence is frequently displaced from the register of serious rights violations into that of ordinary domestic discord, leaving legal protection for women survivors structurally inadequate. Read through a postcolonial lens, this displacement is traced to the colonial-era codification of Islamic law and to a state that privileges family stability over women’s safety, producing what this article terms institutionalized state patriarchy. Accordingly, the article argues for the decolonization of Islamic family law thought, the reinterpretation of spousal relations on the basis of maqashid al-shari’ah and gender justice, and the strengthening of the state’s role as protector of women’s rights, so that Islamic family law can function as an instrument of substantive justice and effective protection for women survivors of domestic violence.