Dutch colonial policy formally demoted Shariʿa to secondary legal status in 1927.

Evidence

In the wake of the Dutch government’s formal declaration in 1927 that adat, not the Shariʿa, was the normative law, institutional changes began to take effect, and further scholarship aiming at systematizing adat (especially by Bernard Ter Haar) came to bolster that policy with renewed vigor. Henceforth, Dutch scholars and their native students—who hailed mainly from a coopted Javanese aristocracy—as well as colonialist advisors and administrators were officially trained in adatrecht as the paradigmatic law. The Shariʿa sunk to a distant secondary position, where it would be accepted only insofar as it was provisionally allowed to modify adat under particular circumstances. This change was formally sanctioned by yet another academic and policy discourse and was assigned the appellation “reception theory.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 258

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how ‘divide and rule’ operated through legal epistemology — declaring local customary law the ‘real’ law to suppress a unified (Islamic) one, a pattern recurring in contemporary counterinsurgency and governance.