Sahaja : Journal Sharia and Humanities
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2026): Sahaja: Journal Sharia and Humanities ( In Press)

From Uncertain to Proven: Evidentiary Closure and the Reversal of the Indonesian Ulema Council's Vasectomy Fatwa, 2009–2012

Ulfa Pirmani (Institut Agama Islam Negeri (IAIN) Kerinci, Indonesia)
Edi Kurniawan (UIN Sulthan Thaha Saifuddin Jambi)
Juharmen (Universitas Islam Negeri Sulthan Thaha Saifuddin Jambi)
Syarif Bin Muhammadromli Samae (Islamic Council of Yala Province, Thailand)



Article Info

Publish Date
05 Nov 2026

Abstract

Existing scholarship on the Indonesian Ulema Council's (MUI) vasectomy fatwas has traced the macro-trajectory of legal change across the three temporal nodes of 1979, 2009, and 2012, interpreting the shift from absolute prohibition to conditional permissibility through the lenses of sociology of knowledge, maslahah mursalah, and maq??id al-shar??ah. The central puzzle of the transformation has remained unaddressed: between the Third National Ijtima' in Padang Panjang (January 2009) and the Fourth National Ijtima' in Cipasung (July 2012), the same medical phenomenon, the recanalisation of the vas deferens, produced two opposite legal verdicts. This article reconstructs the three-year micro-history through which a scientific controversy reached institutional closure within an Islamic legal forum. Bringing u??l al-fiqh into dialogue with Science and Technology Studies (STS), the analysis draws on both Ijtima' decision documents, the 2009 Halqah expert testimonies, Ministry of Health Letter No. TU.05.02/V/1016/2012, and the position statement of the Indonesian Association of Urological Surgeons (IAUI). The findings show that the reversal was driven not by jurisprudential reformulation but by evidentiary reconfiguration: the same evidence considered non-mu?aqqaqah in 2009 was reframed as mu?aqqaqah in 2012 once endorsed by state regulatory science and professional medical authority. The article contributes a methodological case for integrating STS frameworks into the study of contemporary Islamic jurisprudence, and shows that the persistent Indonesian controversy over vasectomy, most recently the 2025 policy debate over conditioning social assistance on the procedure, cannot be understood without grasping how its evidentiary closure was institutionally manufactured.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

sahaja

Publisher

Subject

Religion Humanities Law, Crime, Criminology & Criminal Justice

Description

Sahaja specifications in the discourse of Sharia and Humanities. Sahaja invites scholars, researchers, and students to contribute the result of their studies and researches in the areas related. That aims to encourage and promote the study of the sharia and humanities from a wide range of scholarly ...