From Disaster Fiqh to Humanitarian Governance: Muhammadiyah’s Social Jurisprudence and Disaster Response in Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines how Muhammadiyah transforms Islamic legal and ethical reasoning into an institutional system of disaster governance. Rather than conducting a systematic literature review, the study employs qualitative historical-doctrinal documentary analysis. Its principal corpus is Fikih Kebencanaan and its English edition, Coping with Disaster: Principle Guidance from an Islamic Perspective, read alongside the institutional development of the Muhammadiyah Disaster Management Center (MDMC) and triangulated with empirical studies of Muhammadiyah’s mitigation, preparedness, emergency response, and recovery practices. The analysis finds that disaster fiqh operates through a three-level normative architecture: basic values, general principles, and concrete guidance. This architecture reframes disaster from divine punishment into a condition shaped by hazard, exposure, vulnerability, human responsibility, and the regularities of creation. It also converts religious commitments—mercy, justice, mutual assistance, protection of life, and the rights of survivors—into operational principles such as needs-based aid, non-discrimination, professional competence, accountability, psychosocial care, and risk reduction. Muhammadiyah’s distinctive contribution lies in the institutional translation of collective ijtihad through MDMC, schools, hospitals, universities, mosques, volunteers, and cross-sector partnerships. The article conceptualizes this arrangement as resilience-oriented social fiqh: a form of public jurisprudence in which religious interpretation is tested and embodied across the disaster cycle. Its strength is the integration of doctrine, scientific knowledge, humanitarian standards, and organizational infrastructure. Its unresolved challenges include uneven local capacity, the risk of relief dependence, fragmented data, volunteer sustainability, and the need to connect emergency response with structural vulnerability reduction. The study argues that social fiqh becomes socially consequential only when normative reasoning is linked to institutions capable of protecting dignity before, during, and after disaster.