The Islamic Juridical Vacuum

Petersen, Jesper (2025): The Islamic Juridical Vacuum: An Ethnographic study of How Parallel Legal Institutions Emerged in Denmark. Leiden: Brill. 

Based on an ethnographic study, undertaken in 2017–2024, and inspired by grounded theory this book presents the theory of the Islamic juridical vacuum. I use the word “theory” advisedly, because the theory of an Islamic juridical vacuum not only explains the Islamic legal situation of Muslims in mainland Europe, but it can also be utilized to make accurate
(and testable) predictions. 

The theory of the Islamic juridical vacuum describes the unmet demand for Islamic legal services among Denmark’s Muslim population. This demand primarily arises when Muslim women seek divorces that are recognized within their religious and social communities but cannot be issued through the Danish civil legal system. As the state does not formally recognize Islamic marriage (nikah) or Islamic divorce, this vacuum creates an environment where informal Islamic legal authorities – such as imams or Islamic councils – often assume the roles of judges or arbiters, leading to the periodic formation and dissolution
of parallel legal institutions. This cycle of emergence and collapse characterizes the vacuum, driven by a persistent demand for Islamic legal services in combination with limited resources and significant security challenges. 

Denmark is undergoing a transitioning from the situation of a vacuum to a situation in which Islamic divorce councils have stabilized as parallel legal institutions. This transformation happened in Britain in 1982, when the Islamic Sharia Council was founded. 

Similarly, the Islamic Divorce Council was founded in Denmark in 2021 – a council that issued 206 Islamic divorces in 2023. The transition from vacuum to a field with parallel legal institutions was not investigated until 2001 in Britain, and then only retrospectively. This book studies the transition through an ethnographic study, while it happened in Denmark.

The book contains observations and conclusions that have not previously been made. The most important are: 1) Female Muslim leaders and prominent Muslim women often play an important role in Islamic divorce process. 2) Demand for Islamic divorce is generated by women responding to their own suffering, primarily in the form of Islamic coercive control, Islamic post-separation violence, and honor-motivated control. 3) Islamic divorce cases are “translated” into Islamic legal terminology in the very end of the process. Religious and Islamic legal aspects often play a minor role at early stages of conflict. 4) The Danish welfare state has played an important role in furthering the emergence and institutionalization of Islamic parallel legal institution. 5) There is an epistemic ceiling that cuts across the Danish welfare state. Above the ceiling people believe that parallel legal practices are jurisdiction driven, but below the ceiling people face parallel legal practices that are demand driven (the exact opposite). Knowledge from below the ceiling does not penetrate the ceiling, which means that the political level and top management in the central administration misunderstand the challenges faced by people below the ceiling. This explains why political strategies against parallel legal orders have consistently failed, which is demonstrated by the emergence of stable parallel legal institutions in Denmark. 

In addition to these five observations and conclusion, the book constitutes an ethnographic study, meaning that it provides a detailed account of the current situation in Denmark, i.e. what parallel legal institutions exists and how they operate. 

The book is structured so that Part 1 explains the theory of the vacuum, first by addressing epistemological and methodological issues in the anthropological study of sharia in Chapter 1, and then in Chapters 2 and 3 by presenting the theory, grounded empirically. Part 2 of the book presents an ethnographic study of the Islamic juridical vacuum from three perspectives: male Muslim leaders (Chapter 4), female Muslim leaders (Chapter 5), and the central administration of the welfare state (Chapter 6). The voices of women experiencing nikah captivity are present throughout the book and, therefore, do not have a standalone
.chapter. Part 3 investigates the institutionalization of Islamic divorce councils in Denmark.