Law, Sharia, and the Crisis of Modernity: Reclaiming Substantive Justice through a Maqāṣid-Responsive Legal Pluralism Model in an Uncertain World

Modern legal positivism, built upon procedural rationality and the sovereign nation-state, increasingly fails to deliver substantive justice amid globalization, technological disruption, and rising social uncertainty, producing a widening gap between formal legality and public perceptions of fairness, a gap most visible where state law intersects with religiously grounded normative orders such as Sharia. This study addresses how Islamic legal principles, particularly maqāṣid al-sharīʿah, may be mobilized as a corrective framework for this crisis without collapsing into theocratic exclusivism or normative relativism. Employing normative doctrinal legal research combined with a socio-legal and comparative approach, the study examines Indonesian statutory instruments, including the Marriage Law, the Compilation of Islamic Law, the Sharia Banking Law, and Aceh's Jinayat Qanun, alongside comparative practice in Malaysia. The analysis yields a new conceptual model, MaqāṣidResponsive Legal Pluralism (MRLP), built on three pillars: layered authority, substantive evaluative criteria drawn from the five maqāṣid values, and responsive dialectics among state, religious, and global normative orders. Findings show that maqāṣid integration succeeds most where it operates substantively rather than symbolically, and where interpretation remains inclusive rather than sectarian, whereas formalized Sharia unaccompanied by maqāṣid based evaluation risks collapsing into punitive legalism. The study concludes that MRLP offers a coherent middle path between secular positivism and theocratic formalism, contributing a maqāṣid based theory of justice capable of genuine dialogue with contemporary Western theories of justice.