Agricultural land relations are governed through diverse arrangements involving ownership, usufruct, tenure, leasing, land-use rights, sharecropping, and customary or religious contracts. However, the relevant scholarship remains dispersed across law, agricultural economics, rural development, land governance, and Islamic studies. This study maps the development of research on agricultural land usufruct, tenure, and land-use contracts, with particular attention to Islamic law and contemporary legal systems. A comprehensive Scopus search initially retrieved 725 publications. After applying publication-year, subject-area, language, and document-type filters, 510 records remained. Deduplication and structured title-and-abstract screening produced a final analytical corpus of 390 publications published between 2005 and 2025. Bibliometric performance analysis, author collaboration analysis, keyword co-occurrence, and thematic evolution were used to examine publication growth, citation impact, leading contributors, conceptual structures, and the position of Islamic-law-related scholarship. The corpus accumulated 10,543 citations, with more than half of the publications appearing between 2019 and 2025. Land Use Policy was the most productive source, while the most influential publications focused on land grabbing, tenure security, customary property rights, and agricultural investment. The dominant concepts were land tenure, tenure security, property rights, land reform, and land rights. Collaboration remained fragmented, with many small and disconnected author groups. Twenty-five publications, representing 6.4% of the corpus, explicitly addressed Islamic law, waqf, muz?ra?ah, agricultural profit-sharing, or historical Islamic and Ottoman land institutions. These studies formed a small but growing subfield, particularly after 2019. The findings demonstrate that the literature is shifting from a narrow property-rights orientation toward broader concerns involving governance, registration, sustainability, investment, customary rights, and social justice.
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