Islam, sharî'a, fiqh, hukum – these several ways of referring to God's path or law provide a second set of resources drawn on by Indonesian Muslims. Strikingly, the path along which Islam has been reformulated as a national legal resource in Indonesia parallels the path followed by adat: from a treasury of examples and sayings, brought to bear on a particular case, each has been transformed into a set of rules, an explicit code to be applied by judges. But this codification masks the ways in which Muslims draw on the Islamic discursive tradition to evaluate, justify, or critique specific events.

Over the next four chapters, I consider the ways in which judges, jurists, historians, and ordinary Muslims have sought ways to justify or critique social norms on the basis of Islamic tenets, and to reinterpret Islam on the basis of other social norms. This succession of analyses begins in the courts of Takèngën, with the reasoning processes of judges who live close to everyday Gayo social life. In succeeding chapters, I consider the relationship between social change and justificatory argumentation over a period of forty years in these courts, and the parallel national debates about how to understand Islamic history and law.

In these chapters, we shift our societal focus from village processes to the legal institutions situated in towns and cities. Village life does not disappear from our view, of course; it is conflicts over land and succession that drive people to court.