The Legal Reconstruction of Digital Waqf in Indonesia: Integrating Islamic Legal Principles and Positive Law in the Digital Economy

Abstract

Waqf is collected in Indonesia through platforms, payment gateways, and crowdfunding campaigns, while the governing statute was constructed around a pledge made before an authorised official and two witnesses and around registrable physical assets. The gap between the practice and the instrument is now the principal source of legal uncertainty in Indonesian waqf. This study examines whether the existing framework accommodates digitally performed waqf, analyses the doctrinal problems raised by the digital pledge and by digital objects, and formulates a reconstruction of the legal framework. The research is normative juridical and doctrinal, using statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches together with classical waqf doctrine and maqasid reasoning as internal normative standards. The statute accommodates digital collection but not digital pledging, because the requirement of a declaration before the authorised official is institutional rather than merely formal and cannot be satisfied by functional equivalence alone. Digital assets satisfy the classical conditions of a waqf object only where durability and transferability can be established, which is not uniform across asset classes. Platforms exercise trustee-like influence without trustee-like duties, and the regime of registration, reporting, and supervision does not reach them. Reconstruction should regulate the function of soliciting and receiving waqf, provide expressly for electronic pledging with a certified signature and a recorded verification, extend nazir accountability to platform intermediaries, and define the treatment of digital assets.