Modern Asian Studies 42, 2/3 (2008) pp. 489–518.
C
2007 Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0026749X07003228 First published online 26 October 2007
Islamic Feminism in India: Indian Muslim
Women Activists and the Reform of Muslim
Personal Law
1
SYLVIA VATUK
Department of Anthropology (m/c 027), University of Illinois at Chicago,
1007 West Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
E-mail: vatuk@uic.edu
Abstract
I describe here a nascent ‘Islamic feminist’ movement in India, dedicated to the
goal of achieving gender equity under Muslim Personal Law. In justifying their
demands, these women activists refer neither to the Indian Constitution nor to the
universalistic human rights principles that guide secular feminists campaigning
for passage of a gender-neutral uniform civil code of personal law, but rather to
the authority of the Qur’an—which, they claim, grants Muslim women numerous
rights that in practice are routinely denied them. They accuse the male ‘ulama
of foisting ‘patriarchal’ interpretations of the Qur’an on the unlettered Muslim
1
I thank Filippo and Caroline Osella for giving me a reason to think more seriously
and systematically about the movement I discuss here and for their careful reading
and critiques of earlier drafts. Geraldine Forbes, Karen Leonard and Andrea Rugh
have also provided valuable input. I am especially grateful to Yoginder Sikand for
initially calling my attention to the phenomenon of Muslim women’s rights activism
in India. I am indebted to the following women who, at various times between 1998
and 2006, kindly made time in their busy schedules to allow me to observe their
ongoing activities, talk about their ideas, their goals, their past and current activities
and their future plans: Haseena Hashia, Sona Khan, Sughra Mehdi, Terry Rogers and
Suraiya Tabassum in New Delhi, Nigar Ataulla and Hasnath Mansur in Bangalore,
Flavia Agnes, Neelofar Akhtar, Farhat, Nasreen Fazalbhoy, Hasina Khan, Khatun
Begum, Uzma Naheed, Naseem, Noorjehan Safia Niaz, and Yasmin in Mumbai,
Jameela Nishat, Noorjahan Begum and Rehana Sultana in Hyderabad and Badr
Sayeed in Chennai. Finally, I thank the following religious authorities for discussing
their work and sharing their perspectives on women’s rights and duties under MPL:
Mohammed Abdul Rahim Qureshi, Secretary of the All-India Muslim Personal Law
Board (AIMPLB), Muhammad Khwaja Sharif, Dean of the Department of Hadis at
Ja’mia Nizamia and Qazis Anjam Arifi, Mir Muhammad Qadar Ali, and Najamuddin
Husain Shah in Hyderabad; Qazi Salahuddin Muhammad Ayyub in Chennai; Qazi
Muhammad Waliullah in Vanyambadi; and Syed Jalaluddin Umari, Vice-President of
the Jama’at-i Islami Hind (JIH), and Qazi Maulana Kamil, presiding officer of the
AIMPLB’s dar-ul quzat, in New Delhi.
489
490 SYLVIA VATUK
masses and assert their right to read the Qur’an for themselves and interpret it
in a woman-friendly way. Their activities reflect an increasing ‘fragmentation of
religious authority’ in the globalizing Muslim world, associated with the spread of
mass education, new forms of media and transport and a mobile labour force, in
which clerical claims to exclusive authoritative knowledge are being questioned
by a wide variety of new voices, women’s among them. Whether it can ultimately
succeed is an open question but the movement is clearly having an impact, even
on the clerical establishment itself, insofar as the legal issues it considers most
pressing for women are concerned.
Introduction
In recent years, growing numbers of Muslim women in India have been
publicly calling for reform of Muslim Personal Law (MPL), justifying
their demands for gender equity with religious arguments, referring
to the authority of the Qur’an rather than to the Indian Constitution
or to the universalistic principles of human rights that have long
guided Indian secular feminists in their campaigns for a gender-
neutral uniform civil code (UCC) of personal law. These women are
part of a trend observable all over the Muslim world, in which ‘a new
breed of Muslim women scholar-activists’
2
is seriously and critically
studying the foundational texts of their religion. They are
challeng[ing] conventional histories and canonical texts ...pointing to the
openness of the Qur’an and Sunna to ijtihad ...looking at the context in
which the Qur’an was revealed ...[and] applying this understanding to the
present so as to question the ways in which Islamic knowledge has been
produced.
3
Scholars of the Middle East began to use the term ‘Islamic feminism’
in the 1990s for movements then gaining prominence in Egypt, Iran
and elsewhere, in which women were attempting, ‘ through a re-
reading of the Qur’an and early Islamic history’ to ‘reclaim their
religion ...[and] undermine both Islamist patriarchal distortions and
Western stereotypes of Islam as backward and terroristic’.
4
While the
2
Yoginder Sikand, ‘The Muslim Personal Law Debate: Need to Listen to
Alternative Voices’, http://www.islaminterfaith.org (May 5, 2005), accessed May 7,
2005.
3
Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature (New
York: Routledge 2001), p. 62.
4
Valentine M. Moghadam, Toward Gender Equality in the Arab/Middle East Region:
Islam, Culture and Feminist Activism, HDR Office Occasional Paper (New York: UNDP
2004), p. 53.
ISLAMIC FEMINISM IN INDIA 491
goals of these Islamic feminists—to achieve greater gender equity
under the law and in society more generally—are similar to those
pursued by ‘secular feminists’, their understanding of the sources of
male bias in Muslim societies and many of the remedies they propose
to combat it are different.
Many scholars have questioned whether those whose aim is to get
women their Qur’anic rights can be called ‘feminists’ at all and the
related issue of whether an ‘Islamic approach’ to gender justice is in
any way viable has aroused strenuous scholarly debate.
5
Moghissi,
for example, sees a real risk that if Iranian women are pushed
into accepting an ‘Islamic feminist’ approach as ‘the only “culturally
suitable” or workable’ one, any chances of achieving true gender equity
will be foreclosed.
6
Muslim women activists in India do not have to
contend with the force of an authoritarian Islamic state. But their
adversary, a well-entrenched and widely influential male religious
establishment, is only slightly less intimidating. Insofar as they choose
to confine themselves to ‘changing MPL from within’, rely on the
Qur’an for guidance and side with the ‘ulama in their rejection of state
intervention, they risk having to scale back their aspirations for gender
equity under the law.
Nair has a slightly different but related fear. ‘It may be too early’, she
says, ‘for feminists to take heart’ from the growth of Islamic feminism
in India, because blatant challenges to the authority of the ulama may
have ‘the unfortunate consequence of providing a rallying point for a
new patriarchal unity’,
7
leading to renewed attempts to make women
give priority to community solidarity over the pursuit of their own
interests as women. I am somewhat more optimistic than Nair on
this point. It seems unlikely to me that the women whose activities I
will describe here will allow themselves to be distracted by r eligious
identity-based appeals of this kind. This is especially true for those
among them who are already more-or-less openly calling for taking
5
For example, Moghadam, ‘Islamic F eminism and its Discontents: Toward a
Resolution of the Debate’, Signs 27/4(2002), pp. 1135–1171;HaidehMoghissi,
Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Post-Modern Analysis (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 1999); Margot Badran, Feminism Beyond East and West: New Gender
Talk and Practice in Global Islam (New Delhi: Global Media Publications, 2007).
6
Moghissi, Feminism,p.10. Cf. Moghadam, ‘Islamic Feminism’; Ziba Mir-Hosseini,
Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press 1999).
7
Janaki Nair, ‘Doing it Their Way’, The Telegraph (Calcutta),February9, 2005
(http://india.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/210101.shtml, accessed October 14, 2005).
492 SYLVIA VATUK
the next step, working to get women their Islamic rights but preparing
them to ‘go beyond shari’at’ to obtain those that the Qur’an does not
provide. There is little sign that these women can be made to stop and
reverse direction anytime soon.
Realistically speaking, there is, for a variety of political reasons, little
prospect that either a UCC or any new legislation within MPL will be
enacted in India in the foreseeable future. Under these circumstances,
an ‘Islamic feminist’ approach holds considerable promise, at least in
the short run, for improving the legal lot of Muslim women. The
movement may make some concrete progress toward remedying the
consistent failure of the religious authorities to implement those
provisions of Islamic law that were originally designed to protect
women but are widely ignored in practice today. More importantly,
as these activists’ voices become louder and more persistent, making
the Muslim community—clerical and lay alike—increasingly aware of
the issues and of the remedies they propose, some amount of change is
inevitable. Clearly, an approach that merely seeks to obtain for women
those rights provided them in the Qur’an will not lead to complete
equality of the sexes. But it is nevertheless a promising beginning.
An Islamic Feminist ‘Movement’?
Islamic feminist activism in India is not yet an organized ‘social
movement’, in the strict sense of that term. It is being pursued by
a rather amorphous assortment of individuals and groups, all engaged
in avid discussion and debate about the negative impact of MPL on
women but only loosely organized in terms of action.
8
These women
share similar goals—to spread awareness of ‘the correct teachings
of Islam’ about women’s rights (huquq-e-nisw
¯
an) and find ways to
help women gain practical access to them. And they employ similar
arguments to justify their calls for legal reform.
8
Margot Badran, for example, contends that in the Egyptian context it is
inappropriate to speak of a ‘feminist movement’, because gender activism there
‘is mainly pragmatic rather than political in the more highly-organised or self-
conscious sense’ (‘Gender Activism: Feminists and Islamists in Egypt’, in Valentine
M. Moghadam (ed.), Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in
International Perspective (Boulder: Westview Press 1994), p. 203. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali, on
the other hand, is prepared to define the term ‘movement’ more broadly (Secularism,
Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 3–8.
ISLAMIC FEMINISM IN INDIA 493
Though most work quite independently or in small groups, they
are well aware of one another and even those living in distant places
find or create periodic opportunities to meet and exchange ideas.
Sometimes they join together, often in cooperation with sympathetic
secular feminist organisations, to call a press conference, draw up
and submit a petition or demonstrate publicly against some perceived
threat—whether from the state or from orthodox religious forces—to
Muslim women’s welfare.
How many are involved in this nascent movement is impossible
to gauge. There are a few prominent activists in each of the major
cities and in certain other second-tier urban centres like Lucknow,
Ahmedabad and Calicut. Some run small to medium-sized NGOs with
associated staff and have a significant local ‘grassroots’ following. But,
even if one includes the latter in the reckoning, they are far fewer
than the numbers associated with ‘women’s wings’ of Islamist reform
organisations like the Tablighi Jama’at (TJ) or Jama’at-i Islami Hind
(JIH).
The All-India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board
Two years ago, the formation of an All-India Muslim Women’s
Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB) drew national and even some
international media attention.
9
The organisation was conceived by
a small group of prominent women who had gathered in Lucknow for
a wedding. They cited as the motive for their action the failure of
the mainly male All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB)
10
to seriously come to grips with women’s concerns: ‘Despite prattling
about working for the rights of the women, the men-dominated boards
took no account of the voice of women [italics mine]’.
11
They assembled
35 women, representing the major sects and schools of Islamic
jurisprudence and including a few Hindus. They got off to a good start
9
Tarannum Manjul, ‘Four Law Boards: Will Muslim Women Find a “Masiha”?’
(http://www.sawf.org/newedit/edit02072005/index.asp [February 7, 2005], accessed
May 5, 2005).
10
This self-appointed body was established in 1973 ‘to protect the Muslim Personal
Law in India’. Its 201 members include many of the country’s leading clerics,
representing the major Islamic sects (http://www.aimplboard.org/index.html). It has
no real authority to set legal policy for the Muslim community but is very vocal and
exercises a great deal of public influence on matters related to MPL.
11
Manjul, ‘Four Law Boards’.