Jurnal Fiqh

About Jurnal Fiqh

Jurnal Fiqh: Profile and Author Guide

Jurnal Fiqh is Malaysia's specialist journal for Islamic jurisprudence, published by the Department of Fiqh-Usul and Applied Sciences at the Academy of Islamic Studies, Universiti Malaya. Founded in 2004, it is an open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal devoted to fiqh, usul al-fiqh (the principles of jurisprudence), contemporary fiqh and maqasid al-shariah — the higher objectives of Islamic law. Its own history page describes it, with some justification after two decades of continuous publication, as a prestigious platform for rigorous academic discourse on contemporary fiqh and usul al-fiqh, attracting renowned scholars, researchers and practitioners locally and internationally. In 2025 it reached a milestone its editors announced with pride: acceptance for indexing in Scopus.

This profile explains the journal's origins and the people who built it, its subject scope in practical terms, its publishing rhythm and open access terms, its indexing record, its citation footprint under named sources, and what a prospective author — whether a shariah scholar in Malaysia, a researcher in Islamic finance, or an international contributor working on comparative jurisprudence — should know before submitting.

At a Glance

History: Two Decades at Universiti Malaya

The journal's own history, published on its Universiti Malaya ejournal site, records that Jurnal Fiqh was established in 2004 by the Department of Fiqh and Usul at the Academy of Islamic Studies, Universiti Malaya — a department officially renamed the Department of Fiqh-Usul and Applied Sciences in 2025. The journal owes much of its growth, the history notes, to the late Professor Emeritus Dato' Dr. Mahmood Zuhdi Hj. Ab. Majid, whose contributions were instrumental in its success. Its founding editorial team comprised Assoc. Prof. Dr. Idris Awang as chief editor, with Dr. Luqman Abdullah serving as managing editor.

For most of its life the journal appeared once a year. From 2020 it moved to two issues annually, in June and December, under a single volume per year — a change its editors describe as maintaining high standards of academic integrity, originality and scholarly value while doubling the space available to the field. That doubling matters in practical terms: contemporary fiqh is a fast-moving discipline, driven by live questions in Islamic banking, medical ethics, food certification, family law and digital transactions, and a semiannual rhythm lets the journal respond while questions are still current rather than archival.

The journal has formerly received national accreditation and is recognised by Malaysia's Ministry of Higher Education under the Malaysian Journal Management System, MyJurnal, and it is indexed in MyCite, the Malaysian Citation Index. Then, in May 2025, the journal announced its acceptance into Scopus, effective from 2025 — described by its editors as a significant milestone in its commitment to academic excellence and global scholarly impact. That sequence — national accreditation, national citation indexing, then Scopus — is the classic trajectory of a regional journal earning international standing without abandoning its home scholarly community.

Scope: Fiqh in Its Classical and Contemporary Breadths

The journal's stated objective is to provide an academic forum for the discussion of issues related to fiqh, usul al-fiqh, contemporary fiqh issues and maqasid al-shariah. Each of those four terms marks a real territory. Fiqh proper covers the substantive rulings of Islamic law across worship, transactions, family law, criminal law and governance, in both their classical formulations and their modern applications. Usul al-fiqh addresses the methodology itself: how rulings are derived from the Qur'an, Sunnah, consensus and analogy, how texts are interpreted, and how jurists reason when sources appear to conflict. Contemporary fiqh takes up questions the classical manuals could not have posed directly — organ transplantation, cryptocurrencies, laboratory-grown food, digital contracts, pandemic-era worship — and works out how established method answers them. Maqasid al-shariah frames all of this through the objectives of the law: the protection of religion, life, intellect, lineage and property, and the juristic reasoning that flows from those ends.

The journal's published contents show these territories in action. A recent article on local wisdom in fiqh of food in the Malay world, for example, examines how classical Malay-Muslim scholars treated fermented local foods such as tapai, pekasam, budu and tempoyak, and how the interaction between revelation and local custom produced a halal food culture — a study that is simultaneously classical-text scholarship, regional history and contemporary food-law relevance. Earlier volumes include sustained treatments of the sale of debt and its implications for Islamic financial institutions, and of hibah (gift) law across several Islamic countries — the kind of comparative, application-aware jurisprudence the journal has cultivated since its founding years. Empirical and theoretical research papers, case studies, literature reviews and book reviews are all welcomed, from researchers, academicians, professionals, practitioners and students worldwide.

The bilingual character of the journal is part of its scope. Articles appear in Malay and in English, reflecting its dual audience: the Malay-speaking scholarly and professional community of Malaysia and the wider region, and the international community of Islamic studies. Authors should note that a well-prepared abstract in the journal's bilingual pattern materially affects who finds and cites their work.

Editorial Standards and Publication Ethics

Jurnal Fiqh describes itself as a high-quality, open access, peer-reviewed research journal, and its site specifies double-blind review. Its published ethics and malpractice statement is detailed, and worth reading as a signal of how the journal works. Editors are required to evaluate manuscripts exclusively on academic merit, without regard to the authors' sex, gender, race, religion or citizenship; to keep submitted material confidential; and not to use unpublished information in their own research without the author's express written consent. The editorial board is responsible for deciding which articles are published, is accountable for everything the journal publishes, and holds complete authority to accept or reject — while published articles do not represent the board's own stand or opinion. Authors, reviewers and editors are all expected to adhere to the journal's publication ethics policy.

The copyright notice states that by submitting, authors agree to transfer copyright to the journal, while retaining practical freedoms: authors may republish their work, or grant others permission to republish it, with proper acknowledgement that it was first published in Jurnal Fiqh. The journal adopts a CC BY-NC licence, under which articles may be shared and distributed on non-commercial websites, social media and repositories immediately on publication, and authors may reuse their abstract and citation information anywhere, with a link back to the article on the journal site where possible. For an open access journal, that combination — immediate, licence-backed sharing — is what makes the "open" in its self-description operational rather than aspirational.

Indexing and Recognition

The journal lists its indexing as MyCite (Malaysian Citation Index), Index Islamicus, Crossref, EBSCO, WorldCat and Google Scholar, among other international abstracting and indexing databases. Index Islamicus deserves a note for international readers: it is the principal bibliography of Islamic studies, and presence there places the journal inside the discipline's own discovery infrastructure, not just general search engines. Crossref membership means DOIs and structured metadata that travel into citation managers and bibliometric systems.

Above all, the journal's official pages announce its acceptance for indexing in Scopus starting in 2025. Authors should verify the current Scopus source record at submission time, as with any journal, but the announcement on the journal's own Universiti Malaya pages is unambiguous. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by this journal's ISSNs returned no DOAJ record in the check made for this profile, so authors whose funders specifically require DOAJ listing should note that distinction: open access in practice and licensing is not the same thing as a DOAJ entry, and this journal's verifiable claim is the former plus Scopus, not the latter.

Metrics: Small Field, Real Footprint

Fiqh is a specialist field, and its citation numbers should be read in that frame. OpenAlex, resolved through the ISSN record for 1823-089X and confirmed by a direct fetch of that source record (which lists both ISSNs, 1823-089X and 2289-7518, under a display name that preserves a spelling variant, "Jurnal Figh/Jurnal fiqh"), counts 251 works and 591 citations for the journal, with an OpenAlex h-index of 10 and Malaysia as its country. The structured record on this site carries an h-index of 3 from its own earlier source — a much lower figure that illustrates how sharply counts for small, regionally rooted journals vary between databases and over time, especially around an indexing step-change such as Scopus acceptance in 2025. Neither figure should be quoted without its source; the OpenAlex figure is the more current and more inclusive count available for this profile, while the older stored figure shows how incomplete earlier coverage was.

That expected growth pattern matters for authors weighing the journal. A venue newly inside Scopus, publishing bilingually, with two decades of back content now more visible to international indexers, is likely to see its citation indicators rise as its archive is absorbed into global systems. Publishing there now is, in part, a bet on that trajectory — a reasonable one, grounded in the verifiable indexing facts above rather than in any promised number.

Writing for Jurnal Fiqh: Practical Guidance

Fit is the first test. A submission should be recognisably a fiqh paper: grounded in the sources and methods of Islamic jurisprudence, engaged with usul where its argument depends on method, and clear about its contribution — a clarified ruling, a resolved tension between opinions, a worked application to a contemporary case, or a maqasid-based reframing that changes how a question is answered. Papers that merely describe a practice without juristic analysis, or that argue a contemporary question without showing the derivation, are unlikely to satisfy reviewers in a double-blind process run by a specialist department.

Craft points follow from the journal's character. Cite primary sources precisely and identify the school or schools of law in play where opinions differ; comparative treatment across madhhabs is a strength of the journal's tradition, as its hibah and debt-sale articles show. Where a contemporary application is claimed — a financial product, a food standard, a medical procedure — describe the real-world case accurately enough that a practitioner reader can test the ruling against it. Prepare title, abstract and keywords carefully in both of the journal's languages if possible, since discoverability in MyCite, Index Islamicus and now Scopus depends on that metadata. Follow the journal's current author instructions on its Universiti Malaya ejournal site for formatting and submission mechanics; those operational details are the authoritative ones and change over time, so they are not restated here.

On charges and timelines: the journal's pages consulted for this profile do not state an article processing charge or a guaranteed review duration, so both are best described as not publicly disclosed in those sources; the journal is university-published and open access under CC BY-NC, and authors with a specific funder requirement should confirm current terms with the editorial office before submitting. Submission deadlines follow the June and December issue rhythm adopted since 2020.

Who Should Publish Here

The natural authors are shariah scholars, Islamic legal theorists, researchers in Islamic finance and halal industries, and scholars of Muslim societies whose work turns on legal reasoning. The journal particularly suits work rooted in the Malay world or Southeast Asia that speaks to the wider discipline, and comparative work that puts Malaysian or regional practice in conversation with other jurisdictions. Its practitioner welcome is genuine: the journal explicitly invites professionals and practitioners alongside academics, which fits a field where muftis, shariah advisers, regulators and judges are part of the scholarly conversation. Graduate students are also within its stated welcome, held to the same double-blind standard.

Work that belongs elsewhere includes purely historical or sociological studies of Muslim communities with no juristic content, general Islamic theology without legal analysis, and Arabic philology unconnected to legal texts. Those are fine subjects — they are simply not fiqh, and this journal's name states its boundary honestly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1823-089X and e-ISSN 2289-7518, as stated on the journal's own site.

Who publishes it? The Department of Fiqh-Usul and Applied Sciences (formerly the Department of Fiqh and Usul), Academy of Islamic Studies, Universiti Malaya, Malaysia. The numeric code in this site's earlier structured data was a garbled internal value.

When was it founded, and by whom? In 2004, with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Idris Awang as founding chief editor and Dr. Luqman Abdullah as managing editor; the journal credits the late Professor Emeritus Dato' Dr. Mahmood Zuhdi Hj. Ab. Majid as instrumental to its growth.

How often does it publish? Twice a year, in June and December, since 2020; before that it was annual.

Is it peer reviewed and open access? Yes — it describes itself as open access and double-blind peer-reviewed, publishing under a CC BY-NC licence per its copyright notice.

Is it in Scopus? The journal announced its acceptance for Scopus indexing starting in 2025 on its official Universiti Malaya pages. It is also in MyCite and Index Islamicus, with Crossref, EBSCO, WorldCat and Google Scholar coverage listed by the journal. A DOAJ search by ISSN returned no record in the check for this profile.

What is its citation record? OpenAlex counts 251 works, 591 citations and an h-index of 10; this site's older stored record showed h-index 3. Quote either figure only with its source.

Assessment

Jurnal Fiqh is a focused, durable specialist journal: twenty years at a major Malaysian university, a clear four-part scope, an ethics framework stated in detail, open access with a real licence, national accreditation and citation indexing, and — from 2025 — Scopus acceptance that formalises its international standing. Its numbers are those of a small field counted imperfectly by global databases, and this profile has reported them with their sources rather than inflating them. For research in fiqh, usul al-fiqh, contemporary Islamic legal questions and maqasid al-shariah — especially work connected to Southeast Asia that aims at a global readership — it is a credible, appropriate and increasingly visible home.

The Journal in Its Regional Ecosystem

Jurnal Fiqh does not stand alone, and understanding its role helps authors pitch to it correctly. Malaysia operates a deliberate national system for strengthening its scholarly journals — MyJurnal as the management platform, MyCite as the national citation index, and ministry recognition as the accreditation layer — and this journal's record shows it working through that system exactly as designed before stepping onto the Scopus stage. Around it sits the Academy of Islamic Studies at Universiti Malaya, one of the region's largest Islamic studies faculties, whose departments publish a family of journals across shariah and law, Islamic history and civilisation, and related fields. Jurnal Fiqh is the fiqh specialist within that family, which is why its editors can run a genuinely expert double-blind process: the reviewers are drawn from a deep local bench, reinforced by the international contributors the journal has attracted since 2004.

For the wider region, the journal functions as a bridge. Southeast Asian fiqh scholarship — shaped by the Shafi'i school predominance in the region, by active state and institutional fatwa processes, and by Malaysia's role as a global centre of Islamic finance — has questions and materials that Middle Eastern and Western journals do not always prioritise. A semiannual, bilingual, Scopus-accepted journal edited in Kuala Lumpur gives that scholarship a first-choice home rather than a fallback, and gives international scholars a reliable window into how contemporary fiqh is actually argued in the Malay world, from halal food culture grounded in classical Malay texts to the juristic treatment of modern financial contracts.