MARRIAGE LEGALITY IN ISLAMIC FAMILY LAW AND FAMILY RESILIENCE OF URBAN MUSLIMS IN BATAM, INDONESIA: AN ARCHITECTURE OF OPPORTUNITY

Abstract

In Indonesia’s industrial cities growing through migration, Muslim families face mounting urban pressures, while the validity of their marriages rests on two frameworks that do not always align: religious law and state registration. This study examines how urban Muslim society in Batam interprets and lives marriage legality in relation to family resilience, addressing three foci: how legality is practised and interpreted within families, how divorce affects family resilience, and how legality contributes to the formation of the ideal family. The study employs a descriptive-interpretive qualitative approach with Alfred Schütz’s social phenomenology as its analytical lens. Data were collected through a preliminary mapping questionnaire of 200 respondents to screen case variation, followed by in-depth interviews with seven Muslim women with direct experience of registered marriage, unregistered marriage, or itsbat nikah (judicial marriage validation), supplemented by Religious Court secondary data, and analysed thematically. The findings show that the meaning of legality differs across life phases: young families interpret it as a guarantee of access to everyday needs (in-order-to motive), whereas mature families interpret it as protection of assets and certainty in disputes (because-motive). The findings further show that the impact of legality becomes most visible when a marriage ends. Families with registered marriages can claim their rights directly, whereas families with unregistered marriages must first prove that their marriage ever existed, a burden borne above all by women and children. Beyond this, marriage legality functions as the foundation that enables the elements of the ideal family — fulfilment of rights, communication, mutual respect, and affection, expressed in the Muslim tradition as sakīnah, mawaddah, wa raḥmah — to reinforce one another in an urban society marked by thinning kinship networks. The study concludes that marriage legality is an architecture of opportunity: a structural determinant of family resilience that operates unevenly across gender and life phase. The more urbanised a society becomes, the more a family's legibility to the state determines its resilience—a proposition relevant to urban Muslim families beyond Batam.