Itinerario, Vol. 42, No. 2, 202–219. © 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. doi:10.1017/S016511531800030X The Dutch Mogharaer, Arabic Muharrar, and Javanese Law Books: _ A VOC Experiment with Muslim Law in Java, 1747–1767 MAHMOOD KOORIA* E-mail:
[email protected] This article examines the claims of Dutch East India Company (VOC) officials in the mid-eighteenth century regarding the Islamic source of a legal code prepared for the local population in Semarang, northeast Java. Although the VOC had encountered local legal cultures in Indonesia since the mid-seventeenth century, it preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever possible. But in the eighteenth century, VOC officials addressed indigenous legal systems more directly when the company sought possibilities for direct control. This resulted in the production of many codes on the legal status of Muslim and Chinese subjects of Indonesia. In the process of codification, some officials claimed to have consulted Islamic legal texts and Muslim jurists. One criminal code that came out of the effort supposedly took its h rulings accurately from the Mugharrar, which is possibly the Mu˙arrar written by the Islamic jurist ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Rāfiʿī (d.