<![CDATA[Post-divorce maintenance occupies a critical position in Islamic family law as a mechanism intended to protect economically vulnerable parties following marital dissolution. Despite the formal recognition of maintenance obligations in both classical fiqh and contemporary legal frameworks, judicial practice often produces outcomes that inadequately address post-divorce economic inequality. This article examines how such inequality becomes normalized through routine judicial reasoning in post-divorce maintenance cases. Employing a qualitative library-based research design, the study analyzes published judicial decisions, statutory regulations, and classical and contemporary fiqh literature. Rather than assessing the correctness of individual rulings, the analysis focuses on recurring patterns of judicial reasoning, including the prioritization of former husbands’ financial capacity, the temporal limitation of maintenance obligations, and the use of abstract standards of fairness. The findings demonstrate that inequality in post-divorce maintenance is not primarily the result of legal deviation, but of routinized interpretive practices that render unequal outcomes legally ordinary and institutionally legitimate. By foregrounding judicial reasoning as a central site of analysis, this study contributes to socio-legal scholarship on Islamic family law and highlights the need to critically examine how justice is constructed and normalized within everyday adjudication.]]>
