Modoka Migina and Family Resilience in Galela Customary Marriage: A Maqāṣid al-Usrah Analysis of Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAṭiyyah

Abstract

Customary marriage institutions persist across Indonesia's plural society, yet the substantive purposes they serve for family formation remain under-theorised. This article examines Modoka Migina, a customary institution of the Galela people of Mamuya Village, North Halmahera, which couples a family-deliberation forum with the transfer of a set of traditional household equipment to the newly married couple. Existing scholarship has read the tradition through 'urf in order to establish its legal validity; none has read it through maqāṣid al-usrah, and none has connected it to family resilience. Using a descriptive-analytical qualitative design, the study applies a six-stage conceptual-mapping procedure to secondary ethnographic data on Modoka Migina, including in-depth interviews with fifteen informants, and to the primary text of Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAṭiyyah's Naḥw Tafʿīl Maqāṣid al-Sharīʿah, and then tests the resulting map against the physical-economic, social, and psychological dimensions of family resilience. The analysis finds that Modoka Migina substantively realises all seven family-realm sub-objectives of maqāṣid al-usrah, and that the sixth sub-objective resolves the apparent tension between the husband's absolute obligation to provide the dowry and the material burden the tradition places on the bride's family, by positioning the custom as complementary (takmīlī) rather than rival to the dowry. This study contributes to Islamic family law scholarship by demonstrating how a local customary marriage institution can operationalise maqāṣid al-usrah and support family resilience when practised voluntarily and proportionally. It implies that maqāṣid al-usrah can serve as a working vocabulary for premarital guidance and for local family-development policy. Keywords: Family Resilience; Galela Customary Marriage; Legal Pluralism; Maqāṣid al-Usrah; Modoka Migina.