Reconfiguring Islamic Legal Authority in Yala, Southern Thailand: Institutional Resilience and the Governance of Muslim Family Law

This article examines how Islamic legal authority persists and adapts within a state-centred legal order in Yala, Southern Thailand. Questioning the assumption that incorporating religious law into state institutions necessarily displaces non-state legal authority, it explores how Islamic family law is sustained through interactions between state courts, Islamic Councils, religious authorities, and Muslim communities. The analysis focuses on the Act on the Application of Islamic Law in Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala, and Satun Provincial Areas B.E. 2489 (1946), which provides a statutory basis for applying Islamic law to specified family and succession matters before state courts. The study combines doctrinal analysis of relevant legal materials with a qualitative institutional case study based on semi-structured interviews with three institutional actors. The findings identify three interrelated mechanisms underpinning the continued significance of Islamic legal authority: the redistribution of authority across institutional settings, the functional differentiation of formal adjudication and community-based dispute resolution, and the adaptation of institutional practices to local religious and social expectations. Building on these findings, the article advances the concept of distributed institutional resilience to explain how Islamic family law maintains its practical significance within a state-regulated legal order without relying exclusively on formal legal recognition. The analysis contributes to scholarship on Islamic law, legal pluralism, and institutional resilience by highlighting the role of institutional interaction in sustaining religious legal authority under modern state governance.