Reconstructing Women’s Post-Divorce Maintenance Rights in Indonesian Islamic Family Law

Abstract

Wives file roughly three quarters of all divorce cases in Indonesia, yet the maintenance rules they rely on were written mainly for divorces started by husbands. This mismatch is contested, because courts and scholars still disagree on whether a wife who sues for divorce deserves iddah maintenance and mut’ah. Supreme Court circulars issued in 2018 and 2019 changed the guidance, and the question is now urgent because compliance remains uneven. Existing research falls into three strands: studies of the factors that shape entitlement, studies of judicial process, and studies of economic impact. Most draw on fiqh doctrine, maqasid al-shari’ah, or feminist critiques of male authority, but few connect these with enforcement. This article asks how post-divorce maintenance rights are currently structured, which factors weaken them, and what model could rebuild them. It treats maintenance as a bundle of five claims rather than a single payment. We used a normative-juridical design with qualitative content analysis of statutes, the Compilation of Islamic Law, Supreme Court regulations and circulars, and recent Indonesian and international scholarship. Findings were coded across textual, critical, and transformative dimensions and interpreted through maqasid al-shari’ah and Fraser’s theory of justice. Three findings stand out. Entitlement depends more on who files for divorce and on the nusyuz label than on need. Nusyuz works as an unevenly applied gatekeeper, while rules on quantification and enforcement are thin. A three-tier model that presumes entitlement, structures quantification, and secures payment fits both Islamic legal objectives and constitutional equality. Women’s maintenance rights are limited less by Islamic doctrine than by procedural design. We recommend codifying a presumption of entitlement, adopting a court guideline for amounts, and building enforcement tools that do not depend on the wife’s own litigation.