For many judges in Indonesian Islamic courts, the amendment of Law 7 of 1989 on the Religious Court by Law 3 of 2006 was an impressive step forward. The revised law not only provided the religious judicature with a new jurisdiction on Islamic financial disputes, but it also granted the Islamic court a jurisdiction to examine disputes over sengketa hak milik (property ownership), as long as Muslims were parties in those disputes. Earlier, this particular jurisdiction was available only to the civil judiciary.

Soon after the amending Law 3 of 2006 on the Religious Court was passed, judges of the religious judicatures (namely, the Religious Court of Tebing Tinggi, North Sumatra, and the Religious Court of Sidoarjo, East Java) became confident of their right to examine a land ownership dispute that included an inheritance component. Defendants in this particular case had, in fact, raised an objection, in the preliminary hearings, that the religious judicature was illegitimate to examine the case. In addition, they claimed that the civil tribunals, instead, had jurisdiction over this particular case, and therefore they considered the religious judicatures be ineligible to examine the dispute. However, after referring to the amending law above, Article 50, verse (2) in particular, the judges of the Islamic judiciary were convinced that they had full rights to examine the case. When the defendants brought the issue of conflicting jurisdiction before the Religious Higher Courts in Medan and Surabaya, respectively, the appellate judges concurred with the lower judges' decision that the first instance courts had been awarded such jurisdiction and were fully legitimate to decide the case (Firdaus 2009; Sarjono 2011).

All this new legal development, however, does not necessarily mean that the jurisdiction of the religious judicature over property ownership disputes is well consolidated. It was not immediately translated into wide application everywhere in Indonesia, nor was it easily accepted by the other state legal institution, the civil judiciary.