Digital Transformation and the Harmonization of Islamic Law with Indonesian Positive Law: Challenges and Prospects in the Digital Era

Abstract

Digitalisation has reached every domain in which Islamic law has been absorbed into Indonesian positive law, from religious court procedure and marriage registration to waqf, zakat, and sharia finance. The norms governing those domains were drafted for physical acts performed by present persons, and their application to acts mediated by screens, platforms, and algorithms is unsettled. This study examines how digitalisation alters the conditions under which Islamic legal acts acquire validity in national law, identifies the resulting disharmony, and formulates a framework for digital legal harmonization. The research is normative juridical and doctrinal, using statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, supported by socio-legal material on platform practice and by maqasid reasoning as an internal normative standard. Digital transformation operates on three layers: the digitalisation of procedure, the digitalisation of the legal act itself, and the digitalisation of the authority that states what Islamic law requires. Indonesian regulation has advanced substantially on the first layer, remains fragmentary on the second, and is essentially absent on the third. The principal risks are evidentiary uncertainty for digitally concluded acts, a protection deficit for consumers of sharia digital finance, weak accountability of digital waqf and zakat intermediaries, and the unregulated production of religious legal opinion by platforms and generative systems. Harmonization should proceed by regulating functions rather than media, by treating evidentiary integrity and data protection as instruments of maqasid, and by assigning clear institutional responsibility for digital sharia compliance.