Legal Pluralism and Islamic Law in Australia

Abstract

Legal pluralism offers a critical and empirically sensitive way of thinking about justice in multicultural societies with a variety of legal traditions – Western, Indigenous, Islamic, or otherwise. Yet the critical theoretical potential of legal pluralism has not yet been properly utilised for understanding Islamic law in Australia. This article shows how studies of Islamic law in Australia have tended to reduce legal pluralism to a pluralism of rules or norms, or, in discussing its political implications, have failed to take seriously John Griffith’s now famous claim that legal pluralism is simply ‘the fact’. Against this, this article highlights some key theoretical insights of legal pluralism, focusing on its capacity to draw our socio-legal attention to the deeper normative, conceptual, and material processes that constitute a legal tradition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Western Sydney, it then offers an account of such processes as they appear in the Shia Muslim tradition of law in Australia. It shows material logics of hierarchy and plurality whose difference exceeds narrow rule-based approaches to law.

Keywords

• legal pluralism
• islamic law
• law and religion