<![CDATA[The legal status of marriage registration in Indonesia remains contested: some view it as a mere administrative requirement, others as a substantive element determining validity. This article asserts that a marriage remains religiously valid once its pillars and conditions are fulfilled, yet registration constitutes an instrumental legal obligation (wājib li ghairihi) serving as the condition for obtaining legal force, authentic evidentiary status, and state protection of maintenance and inheritance rights. Employing normative legal research with conceptual, statutory, comparative, and thematic-holistic approaches, this article treats QS. al-Baqarah (2): 282 on debt documentation as the root case (aṣl), whose textually stated rationale ('illat manṣūṣah) justice, evidentiary strength, and prevention of doubt is extended to marriage registration through a fortiori analogy (qiyas aulawi), reinforced by seven hadith texts and two reports (athar) of Umar bin al-Khaṭṭāb on marriage announcement and witnessing, and confirmed through two legal maxims: mā lā yatimm al-wājib illā bihi fahuwa wājib and ḥukm al-ḥākim yarfa' al-khilāf. The study formulates a graduated legal-status classification religiously valid, legally registered, legally binding, evidentially provable, and state-protected resolving the apparent contradiction between registration as merely "administrative" and simultaneously "substantive" in the administrative-law literature. Diverging from contemporary studies employing maṣlaḥah mursalah, this article offers a textually anchored uṣūl al-fiqh reasoning chain, completing the thematic-holistic framework pioneered by earlier research while affirming that Law No. 1 of 1974 and the Compilation of Islamic Law establish a binding legal order rather than merely resolving juristic disagreement.]]>
