<![CDATA[Muslim women in the Islamic peripheries of Aceh and Mindanao face complex challenges amid persistent tensionsbetween official Islamic legal authority and everyday social realities. Despite recognized religious autonomy through Qanun Jinayat in Aceh and the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) in Mindanao, the interpretation and enforcement of these legal frameworks remain dominated by male authorities, producing gendered restrictions that frequently sit uneasily with national human rights guarantees in Indonesia and the Philippines. This article employs decolonial feminist approach to examine how Muslim women respond to these constraints by drawing on lived experience, collective memory, and gender conscious readings of Islamic texts. Using a qualitative, document based comparative analysis of legal provisions, policy documents, and existing qualitative studies on women in Aceh and Mindanao, it traces how patriarchal Islamic legal authority operates within plural legal systems and how women contest it in practice. The findings show that women inboth regions do not simply comply with state centred religious law, but actively navigate, resist, and reinterpret dominant legal systems by engaging Islamic ethical principles, national human rights discourses, and community based activism. Aceh and Mindanao thus exemplify how Islamic legal authority can be rethought from peripheral, gender sensitive perspectives. The article argues that these practices of epistemic dissent strengthen Islamic feminism and broaden the religious voices discourse in Southeast Asia by foregrounding Muslim women as active co creators of religious meaning rather than passive legal subject. ]]>
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