Equality (Kafa'ah) In Marriage: A Dialogue of Islamic, State, and Customary Law in INDONESIA

Abstract

Purpose: Religious (Islamic), state and customary laws in Indonesia offer the same concept with different indicators. Islam offers the aspects of religion, descent, wealth, and beauty as elements to be considered. The state adds the aspect of age as a physical and psychological consideration for couples facing marriage. Customary law accommodates all of them by requiring the requirement of customary social strata in marriage. The praxis dialogue of the three laws above in Sasak tribal society is the object of study in this research.   Theoretical Framework: Equality in marriage is a religious teaching, some of which is also constructed in local cultural values. The meeting of religious and cultural values sometimes does not go hand in hand, and gets resistance from the community. Conflict theory, social change, and Islamic methodology are used as basic theories.   Method: The research used qualitative descriptive-analytical method, by observing the words, actions, and feelings of the informants in the research. Documentation and interviews were used to find the deepest things object of the research.   Results: The study found that the equality required in the Sasak traditional marriage system aims to maintain descendants well and intact. However, the social strata requirements imposed in Sasak society have an impact on injustice on the female side and ignore the value of equality between humans. Marriage with mandatory equal conditions in social strata is widely ignored and resisted by the community. Social changes that cover the education system, economy, politics, communication, culture, technology, and other elements of novelty are a trigger for dialogue and resistance to the mandatory requirement of equality in social strata in Sasak traditional marriage. Religion and the state safeguard the legal needs of the community based on equality, justice and partiality.   Conclusions: In principle, both religious law (Islam), customary law and state law aims to protect citizens and help them to achieve the goals of marriage. However, the meeting of the local values of a particular culture with the universal values of religion and the state is often not in harmony. Local culture values are still restrained by the old culture (feudalism), while religious and state laws tend to be open. With the opening of access to education, the mindset of the community has changed, which is also in line with the accelerated development program in Lombok.