<![CDATA[Although Muslims constituted the demographic majority in colonial Java, a sequence of Dutch legal policies progressively reduced Islamic law to the status of a minoritized, privatized legal order operating under the tutelage of colonial and adat authority. Islamic law in Java had earlier possessed a legitimacy structurally fused with political power, functioning as a legal order embedded in the authority of the Islamic sultanates rather than as a private religious norm. This article reconstructs how the theory of Receptio in Complexu, the Receptio theory advanced by Snouck Hurgronje and later systematized by Cornelis van Vollenhoven, and Staatsblad 1882 No. 152 functioned not merely as a neutral product of legal pluralism but as an instrument of a deliberate strategy to depoliticize Islam through a gradual mechanism of legal secularization. Using a normative-historical approach and source criticism applied to a corpus of colonial regulations (Regeringsreglement 1854; Indische Staatsregeling, 1925; Staatsblad 1882 No. 152), this study shows that the restriction of the Religious Court's jurisdiction to family matters constituted a mechanism for severing Islamic law from public power, an epistemic transformation that reduced a once publicly governing legal order into a legally minoritized private domain. These findings offer a rereading of colonial legal historiography and, read alongside comparable trajectories of Islamic personal law confinement under British colonial rule in South Asia, speak to broader debates on how plural legal systems can legally minoritize a numerical majority, treating Receptio theory as a deliberate instrument of political control rather than an orientalist academic discourse alone.]]>
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