How Activists in Tamil Nadu are making a Difference

Muslim Women in India: How Activists in Tamil Nadu are making a Difference
Introduction
Indian Muslims make up about 12% of India’s vast population of over a billion people, making them the largest minority in the country (Kazi 3). India holds the second largest Muslim population in the world, many of whom live in the northern Indian states. Muslims in India also make up one of the most impoverished minorities, with over 50% living below the poverty line (23). Muslim women, within this overall minority, fare the worst of all being among the poorest, educationally deprived, economically vulnerable, and politically marginalized group in the country (31). Despite broad differentiation across caste, class, and region, Muslim women throughout India share the common disadvantage of being a minority within a minority. Due to this issue, Muslim women share a many problems stemming from being uneducated, illiterate, and subordinated by Muslim leaders. This has led to mass control on the part of Muslim clerics, and ignorance on the part of Muslim women of their rights and the true tenets of the Islamic faith.
Muslim Personal Law
Presently, Muslims in India are governed by their own set of bylaws called personal law. India’s Constitution allows Muslim leaders to retain control over their personal law, which is based on Muslim religious laws, or the Shari’a. Although the Constitution guarantees all citizens equality and freedom from discrimination, Muslim women are governed under Muslim personal law and, as a result, are treated unequally in their communities (Narain 3). The government of India tries not to intervene in Muslim law to give the Muslim community a certain degree of autonomy. However, most of the Muslim leaders who make the rules for personal law do not represent the views and opinions of many Indian Muslims. This has led to the government considering Muslims as one single entity with the same beliefs, and is undermining the rights of particular groups within the Muslim community (Sharma 177). As Kazi explains, “devoid of a national or visionary leadership [on the part of Muslim women], the voices and experiences of Muslim women [come] to be usurped by male Muslims claiming to represent the community” (Kazi 20). The male leaders of the Muslim community (mainly elite, religious fundamentalists) argue that Muslim personal law and the Shari’a are derived directly from the Quran, that they are divine and completely beyond human intervention. Since Muslim women are unaware that the Shari’a is a historically evolving document that has been reinterpreted in various political, social, and cultural contexts throughout history, the assertion that either the Shari’a or personal law is unalterable is unfounded (28). Nonetheless, insisting that personal law is unchangeable is used as a political tool by male Muslim leaders to keep Muslim women politically and economically impoverished. Moreover, because the Indian government has refused to revise the use of personal law, they encourage the plight of Muslim women and display hypocrisy on Indian women’s constitutional rights to equality.
The Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat Committee (TNMWJC)
Within the last year, a group of Muslim women comprised of about 40 members from Tamil Nadu’s ten southern districts have come together to form the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat Committee to fight for Muslim women’s rights. The group is headquartered in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu, and is led by a woman named Daud Sharifa Khanam, a Muslim activist and Director of India’s STEPS Women’s Development Organization. The committee was formed to ensure human rights, social empowerment, and an improved standard of living for Muslim women. It came as a response to complaints from Muslim women about male-dominated jamaat committees, which in most states are domestic dispute settlement forums that do not exercise legal power. However, in Tamil Nadu, the jamaats constitute a unique and powerful group of male elders who legally adjudicate on family issues, such as dowry, divorce, domestic violence, custody, and child abuse (Lakshmi 1). The complaints about the jamaats are that they intentionally hand out verdicts that are unfair, unrepresentative, and favor men. The jamaats convene inside mosques, which women are not allowed to enter, so the women cannot even represent themselves in their own cases. A Muslim woman’s father or brother can represent her case for her, but she is not allowed to communicate her side of the story.
One of the largest controversies surrounding the rulings of male jamaats is the issue of triple talaq, a divorce enacted by the husband by saying the word talaq three times in one sitting. The male jamaats have continuously overlooked the illegality of Muslim men pronouncing talaq over the phone, by letter, email, or through the jamaat. These divorces go into effect immediately, without the consent of the wife. This unfair practice acts as a legal and psychological threat to Muslim women, who have no such reciprocal right to unilaterally divorce their husband. If a woman wants a divorce, she must have consent from her husband either verbally or contractually (Kazi 21). A survey conducted by STEPS revealed that in one out of every five Muslim households, there is at least one case of desertion or second marriage by the husband, citing some physical or mental disability of the first wife (Singh 1). When these cases are taken to the police, the women are told to settle it with the local jamaat, which leaves them helpless, deserted, and without justice.
To counteract these injustices by the local jamaats, the TNMWJC has organized several hunger strikes in Madurai to bring awareness to these problems and demand action by the state and central governments. They have organized workshops, seminars, and conferences for Muslim women, along with offering legal counseling and helping women who have suffered unjust rulings to become economically independent. The committee has also approached the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and challenged them for their lack of courage to question the present interpretations of the Shari’a. Sharifa Khanam herself has translated portions of the Quran to Tamil that deal with women’s issues and distributed the material to women in Tamil Nadu villages. She believes that the Quran is an open book that women should interpret themselves because Islam demands that all believers, male and female, should read and understand its implications.
The most controversial endeavor that the TNMWJC has taken is planning the construction of a women’s-only mosque, which would be the first mosque for women in the world. Traditionally, women are not allowed into the mosque for any reason, even if fully covered. After demanding entry for women into the mosque for over five years and being refused by religious leaders and male jamaats, the committee members want to build their own place of worship, where women can openly pray, voice their opinions, seek justice by settling matters with their own jamaat, and discuss issues of importance for Muslim women. They believe it will give women a place to disseminate issues like health care, education, and talaq. They hope to welcome men into the mosque, but all aspects will be managed by women, including having a woman moulvi (preacher) well versed in the Quran and principles of Islam. Sharifa Khanam avows, “A mosque-jamaat axis is a power center that controls the community. When women are refused representation here, we have no choice but to have our own jamaat. And since a jamaat is attached to a mosque, we have to build our own mosque” (Anand 2). She believes the mosque will be a symbol of Muslim women’s awakening and empowerment, and will further Muslim women’s rights in Indian society.
As to be expected, the TNMWJC has directly confronted harsh opposition to their efforts, especially to build the mosque, from male religious leaders and jamaats all over the country. Many of them believe that a women’s-only mosque is unacceptable, and Muslim women should not be protesting because they have certain rights that Hindu or Christian women do not have, such as the right to widow remarriage, divorce, and access to property. Although this is true in theory, most of the time it is not respected in practice. Other opponents, including ruling Ulemas, have threatened those who have tried to contribute land for the mosque and have initiated character defamation of the women involved. Despite these threats, however, Sharifa Khanam assures that the mosque will be built and the committee will continue to move forward with their plans.

Justice in the Name of God

Justice in the Name of God: Organising Muslim Women in Tamil Nadu

V. Geetha

(Paper written for a conference organised by the Centre for Global Feminist Studies, Gotenburg University, Sweden, March 1-3, 2005, on the theme, ‘Negotiating Gender Justice’.)

Abstract

This paper looks at one of the most exciting and fraught developments in contemporary Tamil society: the slow politicisation of Muslim women through the efforts of a group that has worked for over a decade on issues relating to violence against women and children.

Women’s movements in India have been concerned about the relationship between women and religion, and more specifically, women and the religious communities of which they are a part and whose customs, norms and laws are central to the way women’s lives are structured and negotiated. Over the last two decades, issues concerning women, religious identity, the community and the State have emerged as focal points of both popular and critical debate. With the rise of the Hindu Right, religious identity has been made central to citizenship – increasingly, Muslims and, to a lesser extent, Christians are exhorted to ‘prove’ their inexorable ‘Indian’ ness or face outright discrimination, humiliation and intimidation. In 2002, Gujarat witnessed extreme acts of abusive violence against Muslims, especially Muslim women, which have been rightly termed genocidal. The violence, distressing in itself, was even more horrifying since it was mandated and encouraged by the democratically elected government of Gujarat.

In this context, women’s rights activists working with the Muslim community – in Gujarat and elsewhere – find themselves battling several odds. Firstly, there is the undeniable fact that Muslims, as a community, feel vulnerable. To raise questions on matters such as women’s rights therefore becomes a delicate task: how does one do this without pushing the community into a protective defensiveness? Secondly, Muslim women themselves are caught between their sense of what they owe themselves as dignified, self-respecting women and their felt responsibility towards the community, whose very existence appears imperilled. Thirdly, the Hindu Right’s politics of hatred has pushed a section of Muslim youth to profess their faith in radical ways – aggressive assertions of identity, accompanied by a call to adhere to Koranic norms have, in some instance led to a tightening of community boundaries, and, often, injunctions to preserve community honour and faith devolve on women – who have to voluntarily submit to laws that restrain them. To organise Muslim women therefore has become a very complex task, requiring great courage, tact, intelligence and sensitivity.

To understand the issues at stake for activists working with Muslim women, and to comprehend the manner in which they work, I have chosen to look at the work of a group in Pudukkotai. This group has been active for over a decade (since 1988) on issues to do with gender violence, and over the past 7 years has developed close links with Muslim communities in various parts of eastern and southern Tamil Nadu. The group has successfully organised Muslim women’s groups in over 15 districts in Tamil Nadu and has a programme which links issues of poverty, survival, community welfare and rights. Without getting trapped by the discursive logic of the larger feminist debate about secular justice and religious laws, this small group has proceeded to elucidate from the women that it works with, what they understand by justice, faith and dignity.

It seems to me that the complex and imaginative manner in which the group has posed the question of rights within the community and outside of it provides a very novel gloss on how identities are and can be fruitfully negotiated to serve the ends of justice and equality. My paper hopes to represent a practice that mediates the claims of faith as well as the desire for rights – adhering all the while to a vision of gender justice, premised on deep compassion and respect for women’s lives and struggles.

Introduction: Another Islam

A dusty hot morning in August 2004. At a busy intersection in Madurai city, under a hurriedly constructed cloth canopy, sit over 250 women. Their ages vary – some are clearly young, in their late teens, but a substantial number are older, anywhere between 30 and 70 years of age. The backing that holds the canopy in place is festooned with posters announcing that women are not going to give in, nor put up with abuse, humiliation and violence, as they have all these years, but will, instead, resist. A few posters bear verses which suggest that women expect men to be gracious partners in this struggle, rather than hecklers and tormentors.

In itself this scene is not unusual. One is bound to witness many such sit-ins across India – protestors of diverse sorts, demanding an end to one form of inequity or another. It is also not rare to find as many women doing this as men. But what distinguished the Madurai gathering was that almost all the women who sat under a sky turning blue-white with heat were Muslims. Their heads covered with an assortment of head gear – ranging from the full black burqa that falls as a robe from head to toe, leaving only the woman’s face uncovered, to modest white scarves that some wore lightly on their heads – these women remained on the streets for the better part of the day, chanting slogans, singing songs and listening to speeches made by their comrades in the sit-in and visitors who had chanced to look in or come to lend support to their cause.

Their demands were straightforward and concrete: the compulsory registration of the Muslim nikah namah, or wedding contract, at an office of local government; the repeal of the provision of ‘triple talaq’ (the thrice-uttered divorce demand) which men in the Muslim community often use at will to abandon, get rid of wives they do not like or want anymore; an equal representation for women in local community organisations, or the jamaats which control all aspects of social life in the Muslim community in Tamil Nadu; the abjuration by Muslims of the ‘un-Islamic’ practice of demanding dowry from the bride and the further demand that those who endorse the giving or taking of dowry be immediately barred from the jamaat.

However, the sit-in was more than a protest against specific injustices. The very air that day was alert with the women’s gaiety, anger and resolve, and resonant with their insistence that their Islam required women be treated with dignity, equality and granted the freedom that was theirs by virtue of being one of the great community of the faithful. It was as if a quiet but determined passion for justice and for being heard held these women together – it is not that they were agreed on matters of doctrine, or even strategy, but they wished to demonstrate their will to collective visibility, to standing up for each other.

For many of us, of course, the women’s movement had meant this more than anything else: that we had each other, were inspired by each other and in an unashamed sort of way actually wanted to be together (never mind our petty anger, bullying, contentious and acrimonious arguing). And this same sort of psychic energy, part-political, part-euphoric held the stage in Madurai as well.

I have chosen to begin my discussion of gender, rights and Muslim women by recalling an exquisite moment of female solidarity for an important reason – for it is this that has been invoked, recalled and made to act as a catalyst for Muslim women to name their fear and hurt and seek to end whatever causes both.

The Women’s Question and Islam in Modern India

Gender concerns within Muslim communities have not always been viewed as pertaining to a sexually and socially vulnerable sisterhood. During the late nineteenth century and after, especially in the plains of northern and eastern India, women’s rights were invariably discussed and debated within the overarching context of the Quran. Quranic tenets with respect to marriage, the family, women’s faith and rights to learning were sought to be upheld in the face of customary – pre-Islamic - practices which denied women spiritual and individual autonomy and dignity. Reformers, ulama and those who tried to steer a middle path between the two were all agreed on one thing: that the Quran’s injunctions with respect to women were enlightened, mindful of women’s equality and dignity and guaranteed them rights which barbaric local customs denied them. Therefore, it was important for women to know what the Quran had mandated for them. Several reformers and some of the ulama in fact encouraged women to acquire the skills to read the holy book and live by it.

Male reformers thus spoke and wrote on the importance of female education – several of them started newspapers – in Hindustani and Bengali - that addressed women, others outlined curricula that women were enjoined to adopt and yet others suggested ways of engaging with the faith. Women too were part of this rush of change – they wrote, ran newspapers, lectured and exhorted women to educate themselves and claim their identity as women of a faith that demanded their intelligent and self-conscious participation in its practice.

Of the many women who wrote during this period, Rokheya Hossein stands out. She lived in undivided Bengal and was married early. However her husband, being of a reformist turn of mind, took to educating her – teaching her English and encouraging her to read. She gradually became a writer in her own right and went about – in purdah – exhorting women to claim their dignity. Her novella, Sultana’s Dream is justly famous, linking, as it did, male power with their vocation for war and aggression and calling for a civilisational turn to the so-called feminine virtues of nurture and care, which, she argued, would make for a society, based on compassion, rationality and restraint.

While these contentious and lively debates were most prominent in the northern and eastern parts of the Indian sub-continent, they produced a ripple effect that was felt elsewhere: in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south and in the princely state of old Hyderabad.

During the struggle for Indian independence, Muslim women across the country who were involved in the nationalist movement affirmed their rights claims through an invocation of ‘modern’ secular, republican values. There were several important moments in nationalist history that proved determinate in this respect: the Khilafat hour – 1918-1922- when the claims of faith and nationhood were reconciled to represent legitimate community interests catalysed women into public life and roles. From the late 1920s, Gandhi’s pacifist politics and the rise of socialism enabled women from a variety of social contexts to claim their place in the national life that unfolded during the momentous 1930s.

But in the mid-1940s and after, as partition of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan appeared an imminent reality, Muslim communities, who endorsed the move to draw a line across north-western and eastern India, articulated a nationalism that defined itself as much by its religious commitment, as by its political fervour. For women, this meant that rights claims would have to be resolved within the terms of the new State that Muslims wished to create. (This translated in practice into contextual readings of the Quran and the Hadiths, resulting in some instances in the proclamation of fair and sound judgements by the courts in Pakistan, and later, Bangla Desh with regard to divorce and maintenance.)

In India, after independence, Muslims became the country’s largest minority. Haunted by the violence they had survived in the wake of partition and aware that they had to conclusively ‘prove’ their patriotism, they were forced to work through a complex and delicate politics of identity. The women’s question, during this period, retreated into the background – indeed it did so for all women, who found themselves being returned to their ‘given’ duties at home, now that the nation was in place.

For Muslims, the decades following independence were not as fraught though, as the ones that came after these early years: the 1970s inaugurated the infamous Emergency, when democratic rights were suspended and authoritarian rule proclaimed. This latter sought to win legitimacy for its pro-development programmes by, among other things, targeting Muslims as a troublesome minority who ‘overbred’ and had to be controlled, in the interests of keeping the country’s population under check. Muslim male sexuality and female compliance were now seen as impediments to a planned march into a future of plenty. This on the one hand. On the other hand, during the 1970s and after, successive governments, both federal and provincial, sought to cultivate ‘Muslim vote banks’ – thereby creating a class of professional politicians within Muslim communities who were seldom sensitive to its needs, but often looked to retaining their own authority. Many amongst them, with the active support of governments, sought out the most regressive sections of Muslim clerical and social authority to lend ideological support to their claims to being the political defenders of the faithful.

Muslim women’s lives were uniquely burdened by these developments – for Islamic communities turned increasingly inward and left the business of politics to those who purported to represent them. For women, this meant that their concerns were not germane to community life and would not figure in debates about the common good. Further, they experienced restrictions on their mobility, especially in terms of access to education and public life. (How this happened in different parts of the country and the implications of these changes for different classes of Muslim women are yet to be studied.)

But the 1970s were not entirely passive years. They also brought many Muslims into larger movements for democracy and helped them re-pose issues of rights and justice, not only for them, as a beleaguered minority, but for all those who were victims of State violence. But where issues within the community were at stake, especially gender issues, reformers who attempted to articulate alternative and mildly radical positions, found themselves severely alone. As a consequence, they – for instance, the men and women of the Muslim Satyashodhak Samaj in western India - moved the debate about reforms outside the context of community concerns and faith and took up strongly critical positions against religious injunctions and laws. This did not however prove productive. It led to the creation of an institution to preserve the integrity of Islamic laws, the Muslim Personal Law Board, which, in the name of protecting community interests and faith, deferred all discussions of reform of gender practices to an unspecified later date. (Again, these are matters that await critical mapping – for they did not happen in exactly the same way across the country.)

The decade of the 1980s brought with it other problems and challenges. For one, Hindu right-wing ideas began to circulate as commonsense and Muslims were now viewed as a ‘pampered’ minority. Hindu ideologues extended these arguments to include ill-informed criticisms of the Quran and Islam. Matters came to a head over a Muslim woman’s claims to maintenance from her husband who had divorced her. A legal dispute grew into a social and political debate on women’s rights in Islam – well-meaning liberals, both Hindu and Muslim men and women, took up the cause of Muslim women as their own, and argued for a uniform code of law that would be binding on all Indian citizens, irrespective of their faith. A section of Muslim political and clerical opinion disagreed. A war of words ensued, which came to pose the question of Muslim women’s rights in these stark terms: those who looked to the Quran, or to religious injunctions were portrayed as conservative and resistant to change; whereas those who endorsed the instruments of India’s liberal state as being just and fair emerged as progressive, and supportive of women’s emancipation.

In any case, the decade of the 1980s witnessed Muslim women participate in civic life in substantial numbers. Many joined women’s groups, movements and civil rights unions within which they raised their concerns. (The decade of the 1980s saw the emergence of the so-called ‘second wave’ of the Indian women’s movements [see below], and the emergence of Muslim women in civic life ought to also be seen as part of this development.)

Alternately, they came to a sense of their status as Muslim women in and through the politics they learnt and practised in the women’s movement. This meant that they re-read the Quran, in order to claim the rights it promised them, and to recover the radical equality which lay at its heart.
Thus, some of these women argued, with reference to the legal wrangle that had assumed such centrality for all Muslim women, that the question being debated had, in reality, nothing to do with the Quran or the rights it conferred on women, but everything to do with the manner in which the rights of Muslim women were being subsumed to narrowly defined community interests. What was being lost sight of were the real problems of poverty, destitution and thoroughly misogynistic readings of Quranic injunctions (Bhatty, 1986). The fact that an emergent Hindu Right attempted to convert the problem of Muslim women’s rights into an indictment of Islam and Muslims further complicated matters. But, insisted those women who were active in the cause of Muslim women’s rights, this did not mean that the latter should be decided or construed within the terms of the debate as it existed at the moment. Rather the historical moment demanded, that the problems of Muslim women be considered within the intersecting contexts of community, the larger civil society and a State ostensibly committed to equality towards all its citizens (Engineer, 1987).

The 1980s and early 1990s threatened to roll back the gains garnered by Muslim women in terms of civic visibility and outspokenness. For, these years saw the Hindu Right attain political prominence, and granted its parties that moral legitimacy which had been denied them in the early years of the young Indian republic. The Right’s campaign against Muslims and Islam in India now acquired a certain shrillness that often collapsed into a rhetoric of hate and violence. It comprised two main aspects.

First, there was overt propaganda against Muslims: that they were ‘backward’ and resisted an integration into a secular, civic world; denied their women the rights due to them; were not sufficiently patriotic and inclined towards a politics of sedition and violence and importantly unmindful of Indian’s Hindu ethos. To illustrate the salience of these arguments, right wing ideologues resorted to examples that were profoundly gendered. Muslims tended to ‘overbreed’ and would, in the future, outnumber Hindus (The ‘nationalist’ Congress party had presented a variation of this argument during the Emergence, as we have noted above). Muslim men were habitually lustful and desired to sully Hindu women’s honour and assail the integrity of the Hindu community. Muslim women were mere slaves and required the protection of civil laws that saved them from the Shariat. (These arguments were however not entirely new or unexpected. In the early decades of the twentieth century, in a context of Hindu-Muslim rioting and political contesting, Hindu ideologues, some of whom belonged to militant revivalist groups such as the Arya Samaj, expressed similar view [Charu Gupta, 2001].)

Secondly, such arguments were backed by acts of hoolganism and assault – with Muslim homes burnt or destroyed, property looted, business overthrown and Muslim women subjected to cruel acts of sexual violence.

Hindu right-wing ideologies were voiced not merely in political forums, but actively disseminated through the media – in and through a covert, insidious style of argument that was almost always vaguely menacing and resonant with self-righteous indignation. And, through the decade of the 1990s, as the Right swept to political power in parts of the country, these ideas came to be embedded within State policies and acquired the support of official power, of sections of the police, the bureaucracy and even the judiciary, in some parts of the country. A series of violent acts against Muslims across India, took place through the late 1990s, culminating in the horrific riots of 2002, which witnessed gross murder, sexual assault, destruction of property and worse, the systematic annihilation of the dignity and confidence of the Muslim community.

The late 1990s, fraught with fear and haunted by violence, have posed unprecedented challenges to Muslim women and their work on rights. The threat to their existence as a religious community was felt as acutely by women as men and, in some instances, brought home with a cruel immediacy – when women were ‘marked’ out for rape and sexual assault and their ‘dishonour’ proclaimed as a victory for Hindus over Muslims. On the other hand, such acts of wilful dishonouring meant that women were sought to be even more ‘protected’ from within. In the wake of repeated acts of violence or rioting, both in order to keep women ‘pure’, and often out of sheer fear, Muslim families sought to – and continue to seek to - limit women’s mobility, stop them from going to school, or marry them off early.

Muslim women see the importance of challenging the Hindu Right and have done so in many instances, lending their support to various democratic and left-liberal efforts. At the same time, they are unsure if they should surrender their questioning of gender injustice within their communities to the historical imperative of fighting Hindu chauvinism and state-endorsed terror. For those Muslim women – for instance, the women of Awaz-e-Niswan in Mumbai - to whom the women’s movement, rather, its particular strands, have provided valuable political anchoring points other issues too appear relevant: issues to do with sexual autonomy, choice, economic and cultural independence and a right to declare themselves irreligious. In this context, it is important to recall and not underestimate the strengths garnered by Muslim women active within one or the other women’s groups from the early 1980s onwards. During this period, Muslim women’s concerns came to be linked to other imperatives – to protesting and challenging larger cultures of sexual violence, which appeared to pervade all communities and existed as inalienable aspects of diverse patriarchal social and familial arrangements. The debates woven around sexual violence, which unfolded during the 1990s proved enabling and exciting, even though it did not always answer those specific questions that Muslim women found important, poised as many of them were between their own political work and the imperatives of community building. For it shifted the question of oppression onto a larger and variegated terrain, affording Muslim women activists important moments of political and social cognition and action.

It is in this context that STEPS – whose work is the subject of this study - was formed and to this we will turn now.

STEPS: Inside the Women’s Movement

STEPS was formed in 1987 – by Sharifa Khanam, a 24 year old Muslim woman. She was living at that time in Pudukkottai (she lives there now as well), a modest but old city in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

The decade of the 1980s had witnessed the emergence of the ‘second wave’ of the Indian women’s movements – that is, if we consider the organising around issues of freedom from colonial rule as constituting a ‘first wave’. The late 1960s and early 70s were turbulent years in India, as they were in the rest of the world. Left-wing militancy was on the rise and attracted several young people to its camp. The Vietnam war gave an impetus to a simmering anti-imperialist rhetoric, which, in turn, rendered the communist cause even more urgent and attractive. Women, as well as men, joined or constituted various left groups, with some of them taking to arms – especially in the jungles of eastern and central India, where social and economic injustice defined everyday existence for millions of people. But it was the imposition of the ‘Emergency’, of the declaration of authoritarian rule by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, that actually lent the events of those years an urgency and demanded a radical re-statement of political and social objectives.

Women, especially those associated with left-wing groups, and involved with trade-union work found themselves in jail or made the victims of state terror in different ways. As the Emergency came to an end, and a democratic government returned to power in 1979, radicalised young women began to re-examine their lives – both in a personal as well as a social sense.

Other developments too enabled women to claim rights which they discovered had been habitually denied them. The declaration of 1975 as the International Year of Women, the first conference to commemorate the occasion which took place in Nairobi, the Government of India’s admission – in 1974 – in a searching policy appraisal document that the lives of Indian women, with regard to health, survival, work and a life lived in dignity and freedom, were difficult and oppressive: these events constellated into a moment of historical recognition for women, who were in a position to think through their concerns and articulate their sense of the times and what it owed or denied them. These were of course mostly middle class educated women, but given the general militancy of the times, their words commanded attention even from those women from the working classes, whenever they had an opportunity to hear such views being expressed.

What really catalysed a historically distinctive second wave into existence though were two gruesome acts of sexual assault: in the one case, against an adivasi girl and the other a Muslim woman (in the early 1980s). These instances of rape were reported but the attitude of the police, the judiciary and the general public was so appallingly misogynistic that women – and a few men, especially lawyers – were moved to protest them. And as the protests unfolded, there began a widespread public debate on sexual violence, which soon transformed itself into a new discourse on rights, gender and patriarchal power. ‘The personal is political’ became a rallying cry for those involved in these debates and led to the forming of several women’s groups, which announced their explicit commitment to challenging sexual violence and the economies and cultures which produced it.

The immediate result of these deliberations were two conferences held in 1981 and 1982 in the city of Bombay (now Mumbai) where women from different parts of the country met and exchanged views and discovered how much they had in common. Many amongst these were from left-wing groups, but appalled by the latter’s unrelenting male biases. Some were from voluntarist development groups – these had emerged all over the so-called third world, in the wake of a general call to develop a pedagogy of the oppressed – which were committed to consciousness raising and mobilising the poor around existential issues of poverty and economic discrimination in rural India.

When Sharifa started STEPS along with others, she had this history to turn to, and she became a part of it, even as it unfolded. How did this happen? To quote her:

‘I come from a fairly conventional, lower middle class Muslim family in Southern India. After I finished high school I was sent away to Aligarh Muslim University in Northern India. I got involved in a ragging (hazing) incident which resulted in the Principal complaining to my brother. He grew suspicious and accused me of wanting to hang around boys all the time. I was heart-broken – shades of this accusation continue to haunt me, especially when my brother reproaches me for this and that – and tried to leave the university. But I was forcibly returned to it – I left again, but eventually came back to study a secretarial course. This time, I felt bolder and actually enjoyed not being at home, not being ordered about by my brother. I returned home, I think in 1987.

During this period, I met a woman who worked in a ‘development’ organization. She appeared to have been impressed by my knowledge of languages – in addition to my mother tongue, Tamil, I knew Hindi and English – and asked me if I would be interested in accompanying her and a group of women for a conference of women’s organizations in Patna, Northern India as a professional translator (Hindi is spoken widely in the north but not the south of India). This was in 1987. I agreed. The conference – the third national conference of women’s movements – proved to be a turning point in my life. I was overwhelmed by the stories I heard at Patna – stories of hurt, pain, humiliation, but also of resistance, courage and humour. I saw how women from different contexts and backgrounds could actually sit and talk to each other and discover comradeship. Most of all I was impressed that women could thus hold meetings, discuss their concerns with intelligence and protests instances of injustice – I liked the manner in which they communicated, their approach was so appealing. I also understood instinctively what they were saying about violence – after all, I had seen my mother suffer, my sister persist in a bad marriage. I also understood why my brother had been so unpleasant – not only to me, but my poor mother and had left her to look after the family, all by herself.

Back home, I started giving Hindi lessons – this gave me a chance to interact with a range of women, whose homes I would visit to teach Hindi. I also started to help them in different ways, write a letter, accompany them on a mission outside home – since I was a ‘teacher’, I was trusted! Soon I began to wonder why can’t some of us begin a group that would assist women - we had no clear idea as to what form this assistance would take, but we knew that we wanted to be involved with women’s issues. We enrolled girls for karate classes, organised a poster exhibition on the problems faced by women … We called our group, ‘STEPS’, meaning literally steps to women’s empowerment. And so it grew …’

1990 proved a catalytic year for STEPS – for the fourth conference of women’s groups was held that year in Calicut in southern India. Developmental groups in Tamil Nadu, individual women, and women’s groups that had been formed in the 1980s came together to plan for their participation in the conference. At the conference and afterwards, the question of violence against women was eagerly discussed amongst the Tamil groups, including STEPS. STEPS, meanwhile, found itself in the thick of these debates. Now, however, it had to learn to act – for various instances of sexual and domestic violence against women were being brought to the STEPS office in Pudukkottai. One such case of violence, of child sexual abuse, proved significant: it brought home the realities of fighting a culture of sexual secrecy, voyeurism and brute power. As Sharifa remarked on the details of the case:

‘The child’s parents were extremely poor and were, initially, reluctant to make the matter public. We spoke to them and convinced them that we would make sure that the child was not harmed, or put through the trauma of a re-telling. We registered a case with the local station, where our complaint was met with much jeering and contempt – how would anyone do this to a child? Surely we were not serious? Perhaps the child had invited this, in some way? It took us hours to even file a first information report and ask for an investigation. Meanwhile, we contacted local newspapers hoping media pressure would make the police act. To our horror, we found the media’s interest in the case extremely voyeuristic. After several fights with the police, and interventions with the media, we managed to bring the case to court. This was the first of many cases that we would handle – cases of unimaginable violence and abuse, assault and hurt, sometimes leading to death. In each instance, we found out the hard way, that the police, the courts and the media are all equally susceptible to patriarchal and misogynistic biases. But in almost every instance, we were able to garner the support of other women’s groups, and even if we did not successfully prosecute the case, could at least bring into the open instances of sexual assault that most people were determined not to see for what they are.’

Around this time, STEPS was also working on a range of gender issues. They had managed to get some land allotted to them by local government and constructed a shelter home (which doubled up as Sharifa’s residence). This place became a general clearing house for people who wished to report various sorts of gender discrimination, and was sought out by women in distress or crisis. To quote Sharifa again:

‘By the mid 1990s we were sort of viewed as a general all-purpose women’s rights center and sometimes the police, rather than enquire into cases that came to them, re-directed these, especially if the complainants were women, to our office. Thus we found ourselves dealing with issues of not only sexual violence, but also domestic abuse, inter-caste marriages contracted without the prior sanction of families, which usually ended in the bride and groom being harassed, unwed mothers seeking help, lovestruck teenagers who had nowhere to go, issues that had to do with customary and ritual prostitution …Sometimes other issues came up as well: unequal pay, especially for female manual labour, on construction sites, water and sanitary deprivation in villages, which women felt were their responsibility, the rights of women to participate in public bids for government contracts, women wanting loans under various government sponsored schemes, women demanding that a certain piece of land in the family be registered in their names …In most of these case, we spoke to women, directed them to or ourselves networked with organizations that worked with particular issues to assist them, many times, accompanied women to local administrative offices, helped them fill forms, write out complaints, constantly kept in touch with local government officials so that we could call on them for help. In cases of sexual or criminal assault of women, we had to necessarily work with the police, accompany them in their investigation, expedite post-mortem reports, and network with higher police officers in the State capital …Sometimes, we held public meetings and protests, organized sit-ins, especially if the issues involved had to do with land or pay.’

For Sharifa, though, it was not only her group’s success – or failure, as the case may be – in addressing these issues that proved enabling and educative. She was, by this time, a member of a collective of feminists, rights activists and women thinkers that had been formed in Tamil Nadu after the Calicut Conference – this was the Tamil Nadu Women’s Coordination Committee, constituted in 1991 and it recognised the right of individuals, but not groups, to membership in what was conceived as a genuine, independent feminist collective. The Committee organised several meetings and at one such meeting it was decided to host a state-level conference on violence against women in 1992.

The 1992 conference on violence against women disseminated new definitions of violence in the Tamil context – it called upon women to examine their lives, recount to themselves the times they had been abused, sexually humiliated, hurt, and urged them to see violence as an informing principle, which underwrote female existence and organised gender relationships, rather than as comprising accidental, random acts, provoked by specific circumstances. Further the idea of violence as an experience shared by all women, in a greater or smaller measure, invoked a sisterhood bound by vulnerability, creating a powerful secular rhetoric of suffering and indignant anger. At the conference, and later, this rhetoric enabled all women, irrespective of their social classes and contexts, lay claims to a political notion of rights and justice - and helped them comprehend their personal and existential concerns within a logic of power and authority that held together both intimate and social worlds and structures.

For Sharifa and STEPS, as for several others, the conference provided a forum to realise female comradeship and solidarity – and taught them the value of women forming strong public links with each other. In a more specific sense, for Sharifa and STEPS, the Tamil Nadu Women’s Coordination Committee’s support proved personally inspiring. For one, the Committee became, over the years, a mainstay, a moral and emotional anchor for Sharifa (and for others who were part of it). Secondly, as Sharifa started working with Muslim women, her association with it enabled her to preserve a sense of herself as a civic person in her own right, bound to the world and those around her through her commitment to a just cause. For now it seemed that she would have to answer to being a ‘Muslim woman’. She was uneasy with being called thus – not because she did not want to own up to being one, but because she considered herself a feminist, first and foremost and did not want the effort and labour she and her group had put in to articulate this sense of themselves to be subsumed within a narrow politics of identity.

Two events that unfolded in the late 1990s proved decisive both for the sort of STEPS would undertake in the future, and for the nature of the issues that they would have to confront.

Though Sharifa’s work brought her into contact with a variety of social groups and Muslims were also part of the constituencies STEPS addressed, the organisation did not see itself as addressing Muslim women as such. But the Hindu-Muslim riots of the early 1990s forced their attention on the group and Sharifa had to negotiate the consequences of being a ‘Muslim’ woman, though, until then, she had hardly regarded herself as that, that is, in a self-conscious sense. But as riot victims came to her for assistance, she was forced to confront the fact that Muslim women faced problems that were distinctively their own. “I saw how Muslim women, already oppressed and unfree, was now rendered additionally vulnerable. Not only were they easy targets of Hindu hooligan sexual violence, but also if the men in their families died or disappeared or were arrested, they had to take on familial and public responsibilities – matters for which they are usually little equipped. Besides, given the endemic poverty in which most working class Muslims live, these responsibilities translate into financial burdens as well.”

So began STEPS’ work with women from Muslim communities – initially, to get a sense of the issues at stake, STEPS commissioned a survey of around 1000 households. The survey was to search out the sorts of problems Muslim women faced in an everyday sense, and inquire into their knowledge of the rights guaranteed them by their faith as well as by the laws of the land. The findings shocked Sharifa. She knew, in an impressionistic sense, that Muslims, by and large were very poor and women duped into unhappy marriages but she was not prepared for the findings that her survey brought to the fore: of very young girls being married to older men; of unspeakable sexual violence that women endured in marriage; of the pervasive presence of the triple talaq; of marriages that merely shackled women to their marital homes as unpaid household workers … And most of these women were unaware of the Quran’s pronouncements on women, on its radical position on equality and the very distinctive rights it guaranteed women.

Around this time STEPS also got involved in the so-called Swami Premananda case – the case of an infamous Hindu religious leader who lured young women to his ashram near Pudukkottai and sexually abused them, not only grown women, but also children, and teenagers. The goings-on at the ashram came to light, when one of the Swami’s victims fled to a police station and registered a complaint. Soon after, the place was raided, the Swami arrested and 14 young women enlisted as witnesses for the prosecution. STEPS came forward to shelter these women for the period of the case – for there were great fears that the Swami, who enjoyed political and monetary support, would try and harm them. STEPS and Sharifa were now accused by Hindu right wing groups of being part of a conspiracy to destroy the integrity of the Hindu faith. This experience brought home to the group the manner in which gender issues could be wilfully subsumed in religious rhetoric. As Sharifa noted: “this incident made me think long and hard about religion, gender and women’s rights. I had been thinking on and off on this matter, especially after we had done that survey (see above). After Premananda, I felt that I had to look at the links between women, sexuality and religious laws. That was also the time when I seriously began to think of working closely and focusedly with Muslim women, in whose lives these matters were so closely linked. I asked myself: why not use my position as an ‘insider’ to gain their confidence, set up consciousness-raising groups, organize economic programmes, and workshops on law and rights.”

Feminist and Muslim

Sharifa and STEPS’ decision to work with Muslim women did not mean that they stopped working on the sort of issues they had been working on, until then. But it did mean that they adopt a focused and sustained approach to the specific concerns they now wished to address.
The question of Islam, gender and women’s rights had not really been contentiously debated in the Tamil context. But for at least two decades, since the 1980s, there had been isolated attempts to address the anomalous nature of the Shariat, as it existed in practice, and to bring some of the strictures based on it, in line with the Quran’s more expansive definition of women’s rights. Bader Sayeed, a lawyer and Nazneeen Barkat, head of a Muslim women’s college had been urging a reform of certain practices within Muslim communities, including the giving and taking of dowry from the bride, the frequent recourse to triple talaq by men wanting to end their marriages and the wilful disregarding of the mehr or bridal settlement, usually bestowed on the bride on marriage – and which often served as her financial guarantee against destitution. Bader Sayeed tried to build a group that would address these issues – Roshni – but it never really managed to acquire the public stature required of a group that wishes to lobby and mobilise women and the general public on issues that are not usually deemed pertinent. (It is also possible that the group was not representative of the diverse Muslim communities of Tamil Nadu and reflected the concerns of urban-based, educated Muslim women, belonging to a particular sect.)

Nazneen Barkat too has been a persistent advocate of Muslim women’s rights, and a passionate defender of the Quran’s promises in this regard. She had carried the women’s question forward into various all-India Muslim forums, and insisted on her right to be heard. But she too had not found it easy to mobilise women around issues dear to them, which included issues to do with dowry and the triple talaq, and retain them within an organisation, though she had formed one (Awaz). However she had been marginally successful in getting reformist men interested in the cause of Muslim women’s rights and could and did debate with them on ‘un-Islamic’ practices that denied women equality and dignity. In the late 1990s, both Nazneen Barkat and, to an extent, Bader Sayeed, spoke out in feminist forums in Tamil Nadu – in a 1997 conference on ’50 Years of Indian Independence: Politics, Public Life and Women’, organised by the Tamil Nadu Women’s Coordination Committee, Nazneen spoke on what it meant to be a critical insider in the Muslim community and how she and others like her conceived of women’s rights, drawing on the Quran for argument and inspiration.

By 2000, Sharifa and STEPS began to work closely with Nazneen Barkat and her Awaz group. Awaz was linked to disparate non governmental groups (NGOs) that desired to address Muslim community and gender concerns. Members of these groups had been part of larger rights efforts or development initiatives and had come away from these to form their own organsiations. Together, these groups, including Awaz, formed a collective – called SAYA, meaning shade or refuge. STEPS enrolled itself as a member of this collective network. SAYA organised workshops for Muslim women on questions of health and around legal concerns specific to the community as well as on the rights guaranteed to all citizens in India, irrespective of their faith and origins. As SAYA grew, its members felt emboldened enough to call for a state-level conference. This took place in August 2003 in the south-eastern city of Ramanathapuram, with a large Muslim population. The conference saw women who had probably never spoken in public express their grief and anger at the manner in which the men in their communities would airily refer to how the Quran granted women equal rights and then go ahead and act as if these rights had nothing to do with them and their behaviour towards women.

Those women who proved articulate at the conference were explicit in their criticisms of not merely individual men who disobeyed Quranic injunctions, but also of the ‘jamaat’ or the common body, which represented Muslim concerns within a defined congregational location, based on attendance at a particular mosque. Jamaats are usually all-male groups that meet in mosques and arbitrate on community matters, including domestic concerns, and pronounce on marriage, divorce and property arrangements. Women are not allowed to sit in on jamaat meetings or granted membership in the jamaat – ostensibly on the ground that the jamaat meets in the mosque and women do not usually enter a mosque when men are there. But for the women who spoke out in Ramanathanpuram this seemed a specious argument – and some wondered angrily if women should not then have their own mosque and constitute their own jamaat, where they would be assured of a fair hearing. “At least, we would be present when our lives are being discussed”, quipped a young woman. Sharifa and others from STEPS were in fact serious about this demand for a mosque for women, and even raised it as a point of discussion.


We need our own organisation, our own jamaat – this is because when we go to a jamaat for our problems, we find that we do not get a fair hearing, that we are not given justice – so we need this, to think, and to get together and pray, we need our own mosque –
It is thought that it is only men who can make decisions, that they are the ones who can love, have the right to love and desire – if a man is promiscuous, this society considers it alright, but if a woman is so, it decries her – we must ask where this double standard comes from – We must ask why is it that just being a man gives a person the right to do anything – we must question this and do away with this – and we must ask why is it that only men have the right to pleasure and not women, why is this so? We must be able to claim our equality … Balkies, 32 years


Opinions on the mosque question varied: some women pointed out that there did mosques for women and so there was no question of women not being allowed into mosques. Others argued that the Quran did not forbid women from praying in mosques and in some Islamic countries there did exist mosques where both men and women prayed in segregated spaces. Not all were sure, though, whether women should have the right to a common mosque space – they felt that they would hardly go there, if there was such a space, since their domestic duties would not leave them much time to do so; and in any case, they would be a heedless distraction for the praying men who would therefore be inclined to be less pious.

These differences notwithstanding, what emerged at this conference was consensual anger and resentment at being denied rights in the name of Islam by men who were themselves guilty of ‘un-Islamic’ practices – such as the taking of dowry, drinking, charging interest on loans. Dowry appeared a major concerns, as did triple talaq. The denial of education was another issue that was passionately discussed.

Interestingly, this conference provided a gloss – though unintended – on larger debates on religious laws and citizenship in India. Women’s groups in India had, by and large, always been in favour of gender-just secular laws and critical of the personal laws of religious communities which denied women justice and equality. But in the late 1990s, it was no longer possible to maintain such a position, without one’s arguments being coopted into the standard Hindu Right debate on a ‘uniform’ civil code that would apply to all communities, irrespective of the fact that some of them might prefer to abide by their personal laws – a preference guaranteed to them by the Constitution of India. So some women’s groups wondered if it was not better to insist on reforms within personal laws, rather than ask for a common gender-just legal code. Others attempted a compromise, suggesting that women ought to be given a choice – they should naturally, as it were, be allowed the relief of the country’s civil laws but should they wish to, they could take recourse to personal community laws. However rich and contentious, these debates were conducted within a discursive and legal – rather than a historical - context and informed by passionate theoretical concerns about equal citizenship in a diverse society. Even when it was argued that to ask for a common civic code would feed into the Hindu Right’s strident rhetoric and render minority communities, especially Muslims, vulnerable, the argument assumed a knowledge of Muslim minds that was ahistorical and not sufficiently attentive to actual debates and dissensions within Muslim communities. Besides, what was construed and accepted as community opinion was, in most instances, expressive male opinion and it was ironic that feminist debates on law, rights, gender and faith should have been as uncritical as they proved to be of this explicitly gendered mediation of community concerns

The Ramanthapuram conference unpacked the discursive meanings of ‘secular’, ‘religious’ and legal solutions to women’s rights concerns in unexpected ways. For one, it demonstrated that for Muslim women the issue was not one of defining their stance as either religious or secular. They would not be bound by this dyad and their articulations of injustice and what they understood by justice rested on a complex of ideas. They named their felt and perceived injustices using terms from everyday life, drawing on metaphors supplied by popular culture, many of which incorporated political notions of oppression, victimhood and rights, and on the rhetoric of sexual violence and discrimination made available to at least some of them through the women’s movement. But the normative basis for their anger and resentment at what they were forced to endure was provided by another system of knowledge – afforded by the Quran, which women felt was as much by theirs to own and interpret. Besides, the injustices that they recognised now as instances of a crime that could be spoken of in public appeared patently wrong by the diligently Islamic standards they felt most of them were living by.

Clearly for the Muslim women at Ramanathanpuram, such justice and rights that they sought were being denied them, neither by abstract religious principles nor by imperfect secular legal instruments. Rather specific individuals in defined situations, individuals who were mostly men and who controlled and dominated institutions meant for the common good, and who used the prerogatives assumed by them as aspects of their masculine existence to deny women what was due to either as members of an expansive faith, appeared the culprits. The Muslim women of Ramanathapuram thus came to a knowledge of patriarchal social arrangements which, in spite of the imperatives of their faith, proved intractable in the authority they assumed and exercised.

A Mosque for Women

In the days following the Ramanathapuram conference, STEPS found itself busy attending to complaints and petitions brought by Muslim women all over Tamil Nadu. Many of those who came seeking help were clearly surprised that such a forum for considering their claims existed – and that a Muslim woman had actually dared to take on customary practices and male-headed community organisations. Many of these petitioners had been refused a fair hearing in their respective jamaats and sometimes turned away from police stations, with the ostensible explanation that ‘you have your own laws, go to your own forums’. (This was the local policeman’s reading of Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution of India which guarantee minorities’ rights to practise their faith, abide by their personal laws – that is, laws to do with matrimony, divorce, maintenance and guardianship of minor children. What the police, in these circumstances, do not admit to the Muslim women who thus come to them with petitions, is that they do have right of access to the country’s civil laws, if they wish to avail of them.)

Meanwhile, Sharifa re-worked the demand for a woman’s mosque, raised at the Ramanathapuram conference – she and her comrades argued that if women were to realise for themselves the rights granted them by their faith they needed forums that would grant them a just hearing. A Muslim women’s jamaat, which met in its own mosque appeared a solution that would both honour as well as subvert community norms. For, in her view, a woman’s mosque would be a place where women prayed, talked, shared their personal and familial concerns as well as discussed community matters, and planned for women’s education, childcare and work. It would prove a feminist workplace and place of worship, combined into a single sacral structure. After all, the Quran did not have anything against women praying in public and besides, had not the Prophet commandeered women to know the details and logic of their faith? And had he not called women to him to discuss what was due to them, and had they not sought him out in public places?


Men talk easily to other men, in a way that we cannot. We cannot really tell men about things that matter. We need to talk to other women, and we need to be able to freely exchange our thoughts – currently women jibe against women, talk ill of each other in an unbecoming manner. But we must give this up – we, all of us here, all of us in the jamaat are of one kin, one family, and our men here are our dear brothers, and all of us, this entire society is one huge community. So our jamaat is everyone’s. There are bound to be protests. Your husband says, don’t go. Your son says, why do you have to go? Why do you women want this separate place, why, in the future we men will have to walk with our heads down. But our God has enjoined us to be brave – Islamic women are brave women, we wear this burqa to affirm our modesty, our morality. But if someone was to harass us, it will not help if we draw the burqa tightly around our shoulders. Do you think such a man will let us be, simply because we are Muslim women …This burqa is there to state our ethics, not to prevent us from being brave. Nisha, 38 years


Sharifa’s feminist friends in the Tamil Nadu Women’s Coordination Committee, who had been supportive of the work she and others undertook as members of the SAYA network, were both aghast and sceptical of her desire to build a mosque. The year was 2003 – a year after the terrible riots in Gujarat in which over 2000 Muslims, men, women and children, had been killed, tortured and humiliated by Hindu right-wing militants. The party of the Hindu Right had been returned to office in Gujarat and besides led the federal government. Muslims everywhere were still in a state of shock and fear and besides continued to be vulnerable to popular hatred and violence in parts of the country. Given this context, Sharifa’s friends in the Committee argued that it would not be prudent to raise demands – such as the one for a mosque for women – since this would provide the Hindu Right with an occasion and arguments to further preach against Islam and Muslims. Besides, this would cause dissension amongst Muslims at a time when they perhaps needed to remain unified. Might not Sharifa, therefore, want to start a dialogue within the community before she launched a public campaign for a women’s mosque?

There were others who felt uneasy with this development as well – for instance, Nazneen Barkat and several members of the SAYA group decided to distance themselves from this demand for a mosque. Nazneen continued to endorse women’s rights to equality and justice, within the terms outlined in the Quran, but did not consider it opportune or right that they demand a place of worship that was all their own. To ask for representation for women in the jamaat was one thing and could be considered a legitimate demand, but to construct a mosque for women and realise it as a community space was altogether something else. A section of progressive Muslim women backed Nazneen’s approach on the mosque question and lost no time in enrolling her as a member of a local jamaat committee.

However, Sharifa did not imagine that progressive Muslim men would prove to be consistent in their support of Muslim women’s demands. She had good reasons for her scepticism. As soon as she and STEPS put forth their demand for a mosque for women, a local jamaat came forward to support their claim and even offered land for the mosque. But widespread clerical uproar, which resonated across the country, held the jamaat’s members back and the support quickly died down. Besides, around this time, sections of the Tamil Muslim media wrote extremely hostile stories on Muslim women who had dared to come to the streets – they were depicted as shameless and wanton women who would only bring dishonour on Islam and Muslims. While glad that the cry for a mosque had caused sections of the Muslim communities to face up to the question of women’s rights, Sharifa would not go so far as to grant the communities’ largely male leadership the credibility they so anxiously sought. Likewise Sharfia was not inclined to view the opinions of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Coordination Committee as valid in this instance. While she appreciated their concern, she was convinced that they were not aware of or in touch with the very real anger and discontent experienced by several hundreds of Muslim women, as she was. She was also not sanguine about beginning a dialogue with men who would be sympathetic to her concerns. Those who desired such a dialogue on matters of gender and the community clearly wished her to drop her mosque proposal, in fact, would not even debate it, and this appeared unreasonable to her.

Sharifa had found her constituency – angry, indignant Muslim wives and widows who were determined to wield their faith in a manner that ratified its deepest truths. The old feminist slogan, the personal is political, stood to be reinterpreted by these intrepid women – for them, questions of desire, loyalty and conjugal comradeship appeared also to be questions of faith that ought to be discussed and debated within the terms outlined in the Quran.

Sharifa is, of course, aware that a single mosque in an obscure south Indian town would not really challenge the spiritual and temporal authority vested in male clerics and community leaders. But, for her and others who supported her demand, the fact of women wanting and building their own house of prayer, worship and justice possessed a significance that went beyond a lone building. The mosque represented both religious faith and social desire – it constituted a radical claim on Islam, on the promise it offered them and others in search of justice, the promise of a equality mandated by the Holy Book.

I want to ask why must there be one justice for men, and another for women, why is that men go on talking, whereas a woman has to only open her mouth and she is shushed up. Why, did not our mothers bear us too for ten months, just as they bore these men? And they say they can enter mosques and we cannot. Though we may know our prayers and though they may be drunk, drugged and whatnot. Where does it say in the Holy book that we cannot enter mosques… But …because we are submissive and go further down with every blow, … because we have not spoken up, these men feel that there is no one to hold them accountable…And this women’s jamaat, how necessary this is. Where will women go with their suit, otherwise? And they say such things about us, - we just have to talk to a man - to all and sundry to whomsoever they meet, that “she has kept this man, she has slept around with that one”; but what about them, how they sleep around …and they think they can get away with everything because they are men, because they earn money … but how dare they think we should remain passive, sit at home, and do nothing and worse, not speak. Okay we can remain silent, because we wish to retain our dignity, our self-respect because we are raised modest, because we have children, we find ourselves at home, and we feel we cannot talk, because we have been put down. But why for any other reason? No, we will not, cannot remain silent. I will not, for I have been so for all these years. So let us now talk back, and to this end, I call upon Allah to be with us, to guide us and grant longevity, good will and luck to all of us. Akhtar Beevi, 50 years


Soon, STEPS worked out an agenda that would bring Muslim women together into small and large forums where they could debate their common concerns and plan for their mosque. This agenda, supported by a sympathetic donor agency from northern Europe has, since, been put to work – several protracted meetings have been held at various towns and villages since December 2004, small all women self-help groups formed in predominantly Muslim villages, articulate and fearless Muslim women willing to debate issues of equality and justice keenly have been identified… These developments, in turn, led to the forming of what has since become an independent political form: the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat Committee, comprising women from over 15 districts of Tamil Nadu.

The Prophet’s Promises

The Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat Committee is now more than a year old. It meets once every month and discusses both particular disputes that are brought to its attention, as well as general matters, such as Quranic injunctions with respect to equality and justice, the need to build community institutions that would support women’s education and employment, and the importance of locating Muslim women's concerns within a larger civic and political discourse and practice of rights.

The Jamaat Committee is not a singular body. For example, members often differ with respect to the approach they, as a group, desire to adopt with respect to a particular dispute: should they be confrontational? Conciliatory? How should they engage with local jamaats that direct disputants to them, or are themselves the disputants in many instances? Arguments are vociferously made, publicly argued and contested and decisions are taken only if there is a general consensus. As Sanma, one of the more active members of the Committee notes: “We’re like a court of law. But in a court, there is only a single judge and everything depends on him, his moods, attitudes. And there is no one to check him, hold him back if he makes a mistake. But here there are over twenty of us. Even if one of us errs with respect to a problem, you can be sure that there are others who see the thing clearly for what it is. So, you see, we are even better than a court.”

In practice, the Committee does function like a tribunal. A petitioner brings a dispute – this could be either a matter of domestic abuse and violence, or a betrayal of good faith which the wife and her family have reposed in her husband; the giving of dowry, or falsely contracted marriages or hastily undertaken ones, which serve to hide a man’s defects (such as male infertility or impotence). The Committee members hear the petitioner out, closely question her, her family, ask after her children, if any, and then discuss how they might hold the man accountable. Sometimes, a counter-petition is made out and sent to the jamaat where the woman’s family might have taken her case previously; or if the woman has been subject to gross violence and cruelty, a petition is sent to the police station. In certain instances, a jamaat which had received a petition involving domestic violence visits the Committee on its own accord and seeks to settle the matter through discussion and debate. Very rarely is a petitioner despatched to the courts of law. Each case is addressed and decided on its own merits – the woman’s needs are heard out, her children’s future discussed and the Committee attempts to balance what is owed to her with what is possible to obtain from her husband. The Committee, with support from STEPS, also offers other options to women who are not likely to obtain monetary support from estranged husbands, and who cannot expect their labour to pay for the children’s education and well-being. Women are found jobs, are referred to various social service organisations that might support their case for childcare and employment. STEPS has, itself, begun a girls’ hostel – an impromptu home for girls whose mothers have been abandoned by their marital families, or who are from single parent homes (the parent in question being a woman).

In much of its work, the Committee is directed as much by its understanding of specific Quranic injunctions, as by the details of the case at hand. Its members are convinced that the giving and taking of dowry is un-Islamic, that the word ‘talaq’ cannot be uttered lightly, and that women and men both have equal rights to a happy and companionable conjugality. But while all members look to the Quran for guidance, they do not always concur in their understanding of it. Of the many positions that are likely emerge on any matter of common concern, two might be considered pertinent.


The talaq against women cannot be pronounced lightly – it is a sacred word and cannot be used without finding out about what has gone wrong. A man cannot simply say that a woman a bad woman without submitting himself to inquiry as well. …Allah has made it clear that he disapproves of and dislikes talaq – he wants man and woman to live together, in love and peace. This is what marriage is all about, and not about putting women in a prison – or about throwing them out.
When can talaq be pronounced at all then? Only after due enquiry and it must be said only after a month and then there is provision for waiting, for finding out if the man and woman indeed want to part. All of us who find ourselves in relationships that are problematic, are likely to be angry initially, and we start out feeling resentful. But later, we might feel differently – and those who were initially with us, especially our parents, brothers might now start feeling us a burden, so it is important to give ourselves this month – Allah knew this well which is why he made this provision. He has also offered a second month – and only later, is the word talaq to be pronounced to mean parting of ways –
Also, Allah knows how women are, how they are tender, gentle, which is why he does not counsel harshness, which is why he says, women are filled with life, even as all of us are, they have their own sense of what is right and wrong – and have rights of their own. Allah also insists that those who counsel talaq should first find out about this from both man and woman, not just from men, as is the case today – men of course wish talaq to be said easily, because it gives them a chance to marry again, to demand dowry, money, gold – but the jamaats which hear men must be careful and just – today this is not the case, they might, for a cup of tea and a wad of notes, agree to the saying of talaq – Those who say this do not think of women, their future, their hearts. They only think of what this affords to men – and also say, ‘that woman! She cannot live with one man, how will she live with another?’
So how should the jamaat pronounce talaq – they must ascertain that the pronouncer of talaq prays five times a day, observes the norms of haram and halal, - in fact the Quran is very clear about this: if wrongful – haram – acts are committed, then the agent of these acts does not stand as one of the faithful in Allah’s eyes and our men, they commit all sorts of haram acts. They accept interest on debts, are corrupt – and taking dowry is like taking interest. All these are haram acts. In fact the jamaat members must themselves observe the laws of haram and halal – the Quran is clear about this, that they must know their Quran, know what it pronounces to be wrong and right, and must observe these laws …
You don’t have to go to the courts, find out from elsewhere what you need to do – the Quran tells you how to behave, live – and the Quran is Allah’s book, and cannot be overlooked or destroyed –those who live by it, and are bound by the grace of Allah and his Prophet, know what is good and bad – and they must create a just society for men and women to live together equally… Mehrunissa, 28 yrs.


The one assumes that the Quran is a transparent text, whose meanings are clear and coherent – to this group, the Prophet is unequivocally on the side of women, in fact, favours their cause, for had he not, himself, chosen to take an older woman as his wife and respected her counsel throughout his life? “Our Prophet did not marry for lust. He wanted a companion, a woman who could help him in his work. You might ask, then why did he marry so many times – each time he did this, he set out to prove a moral. And did he not say that he wanted both men and women to observe the faith? He did not think women should not read scripture. He has given us an open book that we might benefit from it. We women should not remain ignorant…”

There are several variations on this theme, and the burden of these readings appears to be: the Prophet enjoined men to be just towards women, he entreated women to know their rights granted them by their faith. The Quran does not anywhere forbid women from learning – “He wanted us to know the faith, as well know what is required to live in today’s world” – nor does it ask them to desist from going to work, or from making marriages of their choice. Further, both men and women are called upon to lead a sexually fulfilling life, and desire is licit for both. Marriage is an active social contract and men and women must strive to fulfil its terms by being companionable, supportive and respectful of each other.

The other position, which also draws its discursive energy from the Quran, asserts that women ought to realise the immense responsibility vested in them by their faith and live up to it. That is, they ought not to be slaves to petty desires, not covet jewellery or finery. Instead, they ought to realise that this mortal body is always already in a state of decay and not strive to satisfy its appetites. Rather they should set their minds on being independent, dignified and look to lead a socially useful life. For this is what the Quran demands of the faithful, that they remain committed to the ummah, or the community of the faithful. In this reading of the Holy book, justice is understood to be an ideal that inheres in a disciplined inner life, in practising the tenets of the faith, and in cultivating a life of labour and service.

These points of view are not advanced as abstract arguments, rather they are articulated in the course of specific arguments or campaigns. In the face of routine observations made by male clerics and community leaders that Muslim women enjoy superior rights, the Committee has felt the need to claim these rights. Their attempts to confront and challenge entrenched male clerical authority are often met with disapproval and scorn and earned them the anger of men who discredit their interpretative exercises as being ‘un-Islamic’. It is in trying to answer charges about ‘being un-Islamic’ that the Committee has felt it important to define its version of Islam and its sense of the Prophet – not only for itself but for all Muslim women.

It is significant that for many in the Committee the Quran is both a text that invites women to an equal civic existence along with men, and as scripture that demands of women a spiritually exacting life. And the women of southern India are not alone in wanting to do this. Women across


Between Allah and you, there need be no intermediary. You can directly speak to, appeal to Allah – you don’t need another person to reach Allah. Allah is close to you, as close as your cheekbone, he is part of what you are and you can read his words – and understand them – as much as you can, and you don’t need to listen to what other people have to say about the Quran – There are two things I wish to stress: that in the eyes of Allah there is no difference between man and woman; you should approach the Quran on your own, use your mind and read it. You have the right to do so. Secondly, in the matter of women’s rights there are many organisations here in India – the Muslim Personal Law Board, the Wakf Board, and many others – which tell us that the Quran says this and the Quran says that. Often they interpret the Quran to advance their own interests. Now that we can read the Quran, we will know the truth …nowhere in the Quran does it say that women should not have their own mosque – and in the event of women wanting a mosque, there have been instances of them having their own – where they can speak and pray without fear – Syeda Hameed, 55 years


the Islamic world, in different social and political contexts, are today re-reading the Quran and the traditions of Islamic jurisprudence to claim what they believe is due to them, as citizens and as individual seekers. Some amongst them are actively engaged in returning to the Quran its universality, its catholicity – this, in the face of obstinate and narrow assertions of Islamism which seek to ground their claims in a series of petty practices and rituals directed at women with the aim of keeping them socially and sexually subordinate. Others are battling with local authority that attempts to rein in democratic re-readings of scripture – including those by women and the lower classes. Yet others are trying to work through the ambiguities of meaning and the demands of faith – as they embark on their own distinctive spiritual journeys. For all of them, as for the women in southern India, there is much at stake, both in an existential and political sense – they wish to lead dignified, self-respecting lives, and their sense of the good and the just is defined by the Quran, which frames and marks their social horizons.

Between Faith and Politics

The demand for a women’s mosque and the constitution of the Tamil Nadu Women’s Jamaat Committee have elicited a series of responses both in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere. Women’s groups and feminist thinkers are both excited and bewildered by these developments. The Tamil Nadu Women’s Coordination Committee, for instance, has confessed itself mistaken in its earlier caution with respect to the mosque and its members now admit that Sharifa and STEPS have attempted and succeeded in creating a fierce constituency of women whose entry into public life could prove catalytic – not only for Muslim women but for the women’s movement as a whole.

The Tamil Nadu Women’s Jamaat Committee, whose members bring with them a voluntarist zeal and energy, appears an unusual vanguard of activists. For one, they are deeply embedded in and committed to local life and concerns – their sense of what is owed to them as self-respecting women is not dictated by an anguished alienation from the world of the family and community. Rather it proceeds from an indignant and expressive anger at the manner in which familial and communal structures and institutions exclude and marginalize women, even where there is enough scriptural sanction for them to be considered equal. The jamaat women see themselves therefore as transforming in practical and everyday terms the civic lives of the communities they are a part of, in a manner that allows us to see the limits of feminist political practice in India over the last two decades and more.

The ‘second wave’ of the Indian women’s movements (see above) defined its politics in and through an opposition to the hold of family, caste and community, which were deemed patriarchal. Its ideologues searched out the hand of patriarchal power and authority in all aspects of a woman’s life – from the cradle to the grave, as a popular feminist song had it – and attempted to challenge it. Intimacy, desire, personal and social relationships – all of these were understood in terms of violence and control deployed by patriarchal agents who were determined to keep women down and submissive. This rhetoric of violence offered women from diverse social backgrounds a rich political register of complaint and anger (as I have noted above), but it also prevented them from engaging actively with local civic cultures, whether of the village panchayat (the village commonwealth, so to speak) or jamaat or caste tribunal. These latter appeared regressive institutions when measured by the lofty ideals of abstract democracy and appeared captive to a pre-republican civic ethos, where locally dominant interests determined the meanings of rights and justice. It did not appear possible then to re-work these latter to address feminist demands. Besides, the possibility of challenging masculine authority through a robust invocation of female victimhood was taken up eagerly and with passion – this too precluded many of us in the women’s movements from seeing how we, as victims, actually negotiated the worlds around us. We became captive to our own discourses and looked to legislative and rhetorical strategies and struggles to address problems of violence and justice.

The jamaat women, by contrast, are discovering and extending the limits of a discourse they have only known as given and mandated faith. Their reclaiming of the Quran has opened up the holy book both literally and symbolically. They have also sought to bring their actual experiences of arguing and fighting – with families, clerics - to bear on their political practice, as is clear from the manner in which the women’s jamaat receives and disposes of petitions. There is an openness to their practice, perhaps because it is dictated less by ideology and more by a sort of Gramscian ‘good sense’, a homespun logic of right and wrong, which, in the last instance, looks to the Quran for endorsement.

However, Sharifa is not entirely comfortable with this looking to the Quran. She often poses provocative questions such as the following: ‘Would you not support a measure that is not ratified by the Quran? What if we find a Quranic stricture unreasonable?’ She also attempts to embed the jamaat women’s moral sense within a more universal feminist logic – through an invocation of sisterhood, of a greater common good. For instance, when calling upon a fellow feminist to speak at a Muslim women’s conference, she noted: “you refer to me all the time, but really, when I set out to work amongst women, it was not my faith that propelled me, but the example of women like this, women whose caste, religious or class status was not important but who felt it important for women to step out, claim their rights. It is women like these who have granted me the courage to speak out. I’ll never forget what my friend Lucy said a decade ago: ‘As soon as a woman realizes what her family, her caste, religion and state have done to her, there is nothing that can stop her from speaking out, from stepping out.’”

Likewise, she situates Quranic arguments for divorce and female autonomy within larger democratic contexts. She does this in a number of ways – by translating the jamaat women’s demands into the terms of a more catholic political register; or she invites non-Muslim women as observers to hear what the jamaat women have to say and then solicits their opinion on what they have heard. Yet, for her, the political moment of which she is a part, and which she and STEPS have ushered into existence continues to be a tensely delicate moment – demanding from her vastly inventive responses.

After word

The politics and practice that I have attempted to define in these pages are of our time – that is, they are part of the moving present and as such mock all attempts to map them onto a coherent theory. However the processes at play are so amazingly original that they challenge what we have held to be valid and true – whether this has to do with the history of feminist protests, or the manner in which these have been transacted. To that extent, the justice that Muslim women demand in God’s name stands to be defined on its own terms – not only as an instance of liberation theology, or feminist strategising, but as an ideal that offers tantalising possibilities – for our understanding of our feminist pasts, as well prospects for newer, feminist futures.

Articles - general

‘Applying Laws to Their Advantage’
Muslim Women Debate Faith, Gender and Citizenship

V.Geetha

Researching Tamil anti-caste movements, one is struck by how often the law is invoked in the writings and debates of its publicists and ideologues. For Pandit Iyothee Thass (– 1914), the law appeared an aspect of a new, impartial state, a constitutive feature of colonial rule. On the other hand, he also expressed a sense of law as an ethical imperative, in this case, identified with the Buddhist dhamma. For political non-brahminism, members of the Justice party, in particular, the law was essentially colonial law, and a measure of a different justice, distinguished from rules and norms that attended local caste practices. Its practitioners could be prejudicial, but the law itself was grandly free from parochialisms. For the radical self-respecters, the law was a focus for their expression of rights – for their upholding of what they considered ‘samadharma’ in place of ‘manudharma’.

However, for none of these groups of men and women, the law was an absolute guarantee of justice and the common good. For Iyothee Thass, the Buddhist way was the most complete expression of social good and justice; for non-Brahmin politicians from the Justice party and even those that were independent of it, progressive legislation enacted by an interventionist state was central to their politics: but they yet felt the need to locate it in the context of a general rejection of what they considered the logic of varnadharma. For the self-respecters, the law was merely a public affirmation of their new vision of the commonweal: legally constituted rights, whether to enter temples, or to compensatory discrimination could not, by themselves, produce the good society: the practice of rational enquiry about all faiths, in the one instance, and a self-respecting mutuality in the other were the final guarantors of social justice.

It could be said that while the law was important for the discourses and practice of an anti-caste politics, it was considered neither sufficient nor complete, unless it was animated by social desire, by a reflexive practice of social justice. In this sense, the law could not be thought of outside the context of the struggles to which it gave formal expression.

I recall this sense of the law, not because I want to discuss it further, but because it provides an enabling though somewhat tangential framework to talk of something else: the question of the vexed relationship between gender and justice. One of the most contentious yet productive points of enquiry for this debate has been the uniform civil code. Feminists have differed widely in their understanding of both the need for and the usefulness of what some of them call ‘a gender-just’ civil code – the term was invoked to distinguish a feminist position from that of the Hindu right, which, as we all know, is equally vociferous in its support of the demand for a common civil code. Some feminists have gone on to embellish this demand in rather singular ways, and included the right to a homosocial existence, including homosocial matrimony and parenting within its scope. Others have suggested that women need differentiated legal spaces, as Nivedita Menon describes it, to stake their claims for justice. Yet others have welcomed initiatives for reform in personal laws.

This diversity of positions notwithstanding, all participants in the debate appear to agree that the question of gender justice, ultimately, has to do with the law and legal reform. Of course, the feminist engagement with law has never been just that: there has been a concomitant insistence on political practice, whether in the form of casework, counseling or campaigning. Flavia Agnes, for instance, has called attention to the importance of a vigorous practice of existing laws, and raised questions about calls for mere legal reform. Groups such as Saheli in Delhi and Forum against Oppression of Women in Mumbai have taken to advocacy, campaigning and lobbying to create the conditions for gender-just norms to emerge as legal fiat. The point, though, is the centrality of the law for resolving questions relating to the good and the just is taken for granted in all these arguments. Secular reason demands this and within the discursive terms that are intrinsic to it, the law is the form of a desired justice, or at least an anticipation of it.

However, this is a position that has been complicated by discussions of law and rights in contexts where civic notions of the public good have to jostle for place with other notions, especially those that draw their inspiration from an experience of faith on the one hand and laws that commandeer that faith on the other. I find this productive tension present in an implicit sense in a vigorous movement that has emerged in Tamil Nadu these past three years: this is the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat, constituted in 2003 and which is active today in over 12 districts in the state.

My paper is about issues of law, faith and justice, as these have unfolded in the practices of this unique group. Like the self-respecters and Iyothee Thass, these women display a utopian ardour which both relativises as well as insists on the valorized relationship between law and justice.

I

I start with a late morning in March 2006. The place is Pudukottai, and the occasion: the monthly meeting of the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat. I have been to three of their meetings, and participated in a one-day sit-in. On this day too the room is full – there are over 15 jamaat members, but they have brought with them several others, and then there are the petitioners – women who are in the middle of a marital crisis and wanting to resolve matters one way or another. Petitioners come from all across Tamil Nadu – they have heard of these monthly meetings, by word of mouth or through the Tamil media. For some of them, it is the first time, others might have been in touch with the jamaat, either through mail or visited local members or the Pudukottai office previously. This time around there were three of them, with their respective families.

The meeting starts off with a woman leading the others in prayer: hurriedly, women cover their heads, and fervently invoke Allah, the most just and merciful. Then, it is business as usual. After half an hour of administrative and logistical talk, attention shifts to the petitioners. Two of the petitioners appeared to have been in touch earlier wit the jamaat, but for the third one it is the first time. She sits, pale and embarrassed.

The petitions come up for discussion: there is clearly a system at work. First, the details of the petition are recalled, or explained. Previous decisions are reviewed and the jamaat takes stock of what had happened since they met the petitioner last. Then, they decide on a future course of action. The jamaat being a cohesive but contentious body, everybody has an opinion to offer. Voices are raised, points of view argued out – sometimes the petitioners or their families join in. I notice that certain clear-cut positions emerge:

The jamaat, I hear, will represent the woman’s interest, but on that account, will not demur from talking to the husband once again, to confirm his sense of what had happened. (This was a matter of unspecified bigamy, but the husband was Hindu, and the wife Muslim, and he wanted to convert to Islam to resolve his bigamous status.) Even as I listen, a woman whispers to me that often they find petitioners wanting to resolve matters quickly, especially if the case at hand pertained to property or monetary settlements; in such case, it would not do, she noted, to take the woman’s point of view without cross-checking, since financial compensation did not always imply justice had been done to the woman, or that her point of view had been taken into consideration.

As the second petition comes up, there is an audible rustle of anger in the group: much of this is directed at the local jamaat, or committee attached to the mosque to which the petitioner’s family is linked. The jamaat had once again desisted from listening both to the petitioner’s demands – the jamaat had endorsed her husband’s decision to divorce her without seeking her point of view - as well as refused to respond to the letter sent to them by the women’s jamaat, requesting their cooperation. This happens often: local jamaats irk both the petitioners as well as their defendants by their high-handedness, their refusal to listen to women, and the manner in which they openly take the part of the rich and the powerful. Women’s jamaat members are particularly incensed by what they perceive as misogyny and ignorant prejudice on the part of the heads of local jamaats. In this instance, they decide that a group of them would visit the jamaat in question and argue the merits of the case that had come to them. A member points out that this was not the first instance of that particular jamaat being impervious to women’s needs, and wonders if the women’s jamaat should not plan a public protest in that part of the state. Everyone agrees, but decide to postpone discussion until the next petition is heard.

The third petitioner, being new, is heard out in public: her father speaks on her behalf, but later on the women insist that the girl speak as well. She does, but cries all the time: this time it was a case of a woman being enticed into a marriage that turned sour, when she discovered her husband was both impotent and violent. The local jamaat had apparently taken the husband’s part and counseled her to be an obedient wife. The case is discussed and a letter drafted to the local jamaat. A woman is deputed to pay a visit to the ‘local area’, as it is referred to. The young petitioner continues to cry, whereupon one of the jamaat members goes to her side, holds her hand and asks her not to lose faith in her god – for in his mercy he would make sure justice is done to her. Besides, she should not forget, urges her counselor, that justice done on earth is one thing, but there is a greater justice which will ultimately hold sway. Meanwhile, she should learn to be strong, continue her education and pray to Allah that her husband mends his ways and not harm other women, as she had been harmed. Finally: “People tell us women that our very life is at stake in these matters. But is only life with a man a worthy life? Can’t we be happy in other ways? We never quite think about this, but foolishly accept this rhetoric…”

Once the petitions are disposed of, a sura from the Quran, relating to women’s rights, is read out and explained. The woman who reads it out solemnly praises the Shariat and notes that the word of God can never be wrong and only wrong-headed men would imagine that women need no justice. “Our jamaat men know neither the shariat nor the hadiths” quips another. “First find out if they even read the Holy Quran” chortles a third.

At this point, the jamaat’s coordinator stands up and announces that she has ordered several copies of the Holy Quran in Tamil translation, and soon all jamaat members will have their copies. Everyone smiles. Some note they already have copies, but offer to pass these around to others. One woman points out that on an earlier occasion, when some of them had visited a local jamaat, they had gone armed with the Holy Quran and proceeded to read the strictures on talaq when the jamaat head attempted to defend his endorsement of the triple talaq. “And you should have seen his face. Clearly he did not think we women know the holy book – for them it is good enough if we learn the Arabic by rote and not ask for the meanings.” “These fellows do not want us to know the Holy Quran, can’t you see? I am sure there are other things too that they are not letting us read …”

The coordinator points out that for women only the word of the Holy Quran could be conclusive.” “The Hadiths?” someone asks anxiously. “Also, but let us not forget that the Hadiths are not the word of God or the Prophet. They were written by men and like men today, they too must have been biased and prejudiced.” “Were there no women who wrote the Hadiths?” “How could there be? Even today they don’t let us talk! And back then they would have been worse…” This exchange is terminated by the woman who had originally read out the suras: “The Prophet was not like them”, she notes, “He listened to women. How many times we read in the Holy Quran of women visiting him and clearing their doubts…” “Don’t forget that he had the best adviser in the world – the redoubtable Khadija…” a voice echoes.

And thus the meeting tapers to a finish.

II

Most jamaat meetings veer thus between social comment and anger on the one hand, and an examination of pragmatic civic choices for the woman in question, on the other. The Holy Quran and the Prophet are veritable presences throughout, and are invoked, recalled and made to bear witness to the women’s jamaat’s desire for gender justice.

The issues that come up for hearing before the jamaat include the triple talaq, polygamy, marriage contracted – by men – under false pretences, impotence as a ground for separation, remarriage for women, recovering dowry … Domestic violence is seldom identified as a problem in itself, but always in conjunction with a host of other problems. In most cases, petitioners had first approached their local jamaats and only when they did not receive a fair hearing, approached the women’s jamaat. It is not clear whether local jamaats considered the issues before them within the terms of the shariat, as they understood it, or claimed Islamic authority for their decisions, on the basis of a commonsensical rhetoric of what constitutes correct Islam practice. It is possible that they were directed as much by the latter, as by the former. Clearly they function as caste tribunals do – heeding local custom and the balance of local social and economic relationships, and bring to their judgments an ‘Islamic’ edge.

Significantly, the women’s jamaat has trained its critique at precisely this fudging of principles: In several instances, its members have pointed out that when it comes to polygamy and the triple talaq, jamaats invoke the authority of the shariat, but when it comes to fixing meher, the taking of dowry, the sexual rights of wives, their right to a legitimate share of family property and even re-marriage, most jamaats allow themselves to fall in with local patriarchal custom.

If a petitioner is unhappy with a jamaat ruling, he or she sometimes approaches the local police, requesting an inquiry. But, it appears that at the police station, they are told to ‘go to their own people’, since they have their own laws. Only when the matter at hand involves violence and hurt are the police known to respond to Muslim petitioners. As far as the women’s jamaat is concerned, though, they see the importance of taking matters to the police and the courts, should the local jamaat prove intractable. It is as if they wish to wrest from the latter its right to judge and return this right to secular institutions. But this is not done in the faith that the latter are intrinsically more sensitive to and even objective where women’s rights are concerned. Rather, this turning to the law and the courts has the force of a civil threat, and it is the penal power of secular institutions that is invoked, rather than their ostensible objective or just character.

However, the women’s jamaat has also been very discreet in the manner it draws on penal authority. In late 2005, a meeting of the jamaat organized in the port city of Tuticorin met with tremendous resistance from locally powerful men and the jamaats of which they were members. Women from the community were determined to hold the meeting, and there were several tense moments, for the men called in the police, claiming that they envisaged a threat to civil peace. Women members countered this accusation but when asked to press charges against the men refused to do so. As the local women’s jamaat coordinator put it: we don’t want the police to use this a chance to harass and threaten young Muslim men, which they are always waiting to do. We merely want men to know that if they chose to go to the police, we would too.

As a mediating body, as a self-defined Islamic forum that arbitrates between families, local authority and state institutions, the women’s jamaat functions at different levels. It clearly wishes to undermine the power of local jamaats, and it does this by questioning the religious knowledge and authority that this power so easily assumes. As an arbitrator, it gestures towards the police and courts, suggesting to the families that are party to a petition that if they cannot mend matters on their own, the police and courts would have to be called in. As an Islamic forum, the jamaat is avidly interested in bringing the authority of the Quran to define and measure its own sense of justice. This latter is located as much in what might be called a feminist commonsense, as it is in readings of the Quran and the one informs the other in unexpected ways.

Feminism is not articulated as a self-conscious ideology and exists as an instance of righteous indignation, which is then framed in terms we would recognize as feminist. This is done at the instance of the jamaat’s chief coordinator , who has been active in the women’s movement for over fifteen years. A Sunni Muslim herself, she remembers 1992 as an important year, for she was forced to acknowledge then that she was irredeemably a Muslim. The spate of riots that followed in the years after convinced her of the importance of mobilizing Muslim women: “we had become news in a specific sort of way, as victims of violence. But what about the violence within, the discrimination that we dare not speak about openly? Between the outside world that threatened us, and the inside world of poverty and discrimination, I saw there was no way out but to organize ourselves.” The issues that she wished to focus on included routine patriarchal violence and she realized that once she learnt to engage with local communities, it was important to distinguish the actual practices of abuse and discrimination from whatever was considered ‘Islamic’. This also meant then that one engage with Islam not in a combative fashion, but with the intention of understanding its core.

The shariat did not engage the jamaat’s attention even in its earliest days, when it was as yet an incipient movement. While their demands, three years ago, included a new nikah namaah, the annulment of the triple talaq and the re-institution of meher, these were articulated less in terms of a desired legal reform, and more as discursive moments that would enable Muslim women to speak and argue (those who wished to invoke the shariat as law soon distanced themselves from the activities of the jamaat). And they spoke and argued, they also directed their questions to Muslim men and leaders who they noted boasted about how Islam had granted rights to women centuries ago, but did not ever want to define what these rights were, or change their attitudes to reflect this nobility of what they were so obviously proud.

To counter these men and to know what the Quran held for them, women took to reading it avidly. They also took to discussing amongst themselves the import of the Prophet’s life and in meetings and sit-ins, proclaimed aloud his feminist credentials on several counts: he had married an older woman, and a widow; he heeded her counsel, and was respectful of all women; though he married several wives, his choices were not dictated by desire or lust, but a sense of duty and history; he urged companionship between men and women (in this context, they also note that only someone as spiritually powerful as the Prophet could do this and mere mortal men who attempt to vindicate their polygamous intentions by recalling the Prophet’s life are opportunists and revilers of the faith); he spoke of the importance of spiritual living, not because he did not want justice in this world, but he wanted his followers to not become slaves to a life of flesh, and instead wanted them to cultivate their minds, their intelligence, and here he called upon women of the faith as well …

This peculiar mixture of registers and approaches, the manner in which legal and secular options are intermeshed with civic and religious ones, the almost iconic place accorded to the aniconic Quran and the zeal with which the holy book is made to yield laws for everyday living – Islam is invoked less as faith, and more as a way of living, available to all those interested in justice and peace - cast our certainties about secularism and the law, religion and authority into embarrassing disarray. So, how do we make sense of this?
III

Those that know of the women’s jamaat, including Muslim women, are clearly drawn to its work, but are not quite sure as to how to ‘account’ for it. Some have insisted that perhaps the jamaat ought consider its reliance on the Quran as importantly strategic, but should soon move on to conceptualizing a vision of gender justice that relies on a secular understanding of the world. Others have pointed out that by assenting to the determinate status of the Quran, the women’s jamaat is perhaps legitimizing the role of faith in defining social justice. This is what fundamentalists do and in this war of interpretations, they clearly would – and do – have the upper hand. Yet others have questioned the wisdom of relying on the Quran for all matters to do with gender justice: for instance, they argue, with the Quran being openly inimical to sexual choice and homosexual desire, one cannot expect the holy book to answer the needs of lesbians and gay people.

The jamaat’s response to these questions has been considerate and interesting. The chief coordinator to whom these questions are often addressed has this to say: that at present the Quran defines the horizon of what we consider possible, and what is meaningful for us in the context of our life situations. It is true that the Quran is open to different sorts of readings. Well, these are our readings, and we wish to claim the Quran as equally ours in these very distinctive ways. It is not that we consider the Quran alone as a source and index of justice. But unless and until we learn to identify for ourselves other sources as being as meaningful and as valid for our purposes, the Quran will remain central to our work. In sexual matters, things are complicated, but we will have to wait and see how we work through Quranic injunctions in this respect. Our women are not inhibited, or as bound by the forced decorum of chastity. We are far more robust and open to the idea of sexual happiness, and same sex love is not unknown. But we might not want to talk about it in terms of a rights discourse – things happen, are acknowledged or not, but this has not been as central to our sense of what we want. When it does become important, we will work through it as we have worked through other issues.

Much of the unease with respect to the jamaat’s characteristically mixed discourse of faith, law and justice stems, I suspect, from our own secular desire to claim for social movements a rightness that reflects our sense of justice. In doing so we burden movements with an impossible innocence, and demand from them a tidy coincidence of motives, ideas and action, which ultimately resolves into a grand universal plea for secular justice. Impatient and uneasy with the attractions of faith, we seldom interrogate our own good faith in secular options – a faith that has been disproved and rendered illegitimate in any number of instances. Perhaps it might be useful to consider, in this context, how feminists living in Islamic societies have responded to the question of faith and justice.

IV

Afsaneh Najmabadi, an Iranian feminist has pointed out for secularists like her “the
emergence of women’s activist currents, including feminists, from Islamist ranks” seemed as if it would “jeopardize the already precarious social space for secular feminism”. But, she notes, “their very existence and multiplication into many feminist and gender-activist voices over the past decade, by muddying the clear lines of what or who is Islamist … has been exasperating to hard-line Islamists set on keeping these boundaries clear and patrolled. Unfortunately, it has also been received as unsettling and discomforting by some secular feminists who often demand that these women clarify their stance and draw this or that line, whether the line of separation of religion from government, or the line of autonomy from men. This is quite a dangerous move; for if it succeeds in forcing them “to choose’’ instead of keeping the ground muddled, fluid, and shifting, it will constrict the transformative possibilities of the present moment.”
Najmabadi’s own work has focused on the manner in which gender and sexuality are figured and re-figured in Iranian modernity: she argues that sexual identities and choices as these were negotiated in the early decades of the modern period, in the nineteenth century, indicated to us that sensuality and piety, desire and suffering are matters that cannot be understood only in terms of a register of rights. They appear both elusive and fragmentary, and call for a deeper interrogation of cultural practice itself – which is neither secular nor religious, but happens in between, in a threshold space which traffics between the two worlds.

In fact, it is clear that this threshold space is produced by what women do, the choices they make. Referring to the manner in which women have sought to claim the Quran for themselves in contemporary Iran, Najmabadi notes: “the most significant difference is not only that women are prominent reinterpreters, but that these interpretative ventures are carried out in the printed pages of a women’s journal, in a public space, rather than the private chambers of religious scholars. The authors are posed as “public intellectuals” rather than as private teachers and preachers. Their audience is other women (and men) as citizens, rather than theological students and other clerical commentators. Not only have these openly feminist reinterpretive ventures produced a radical decentering of the clergy from the domain of interpretation, but by positioning women’s needs as grounds for interpretation and women as public commentators of canonical and legal texts they promise that political democratization … would no longer be a “manly” preoccupation. Moreover, by declaring their interpretive enterprise open to nonbelievers and non-Muslims, emphasizing expertise rather than faith, and by placing woman, in her contemporary social concreteness and her needs and choices, in the center of their arguments, they have opened up a productive space for conversations and alliances among feminists in Iran beyond previous divisions between secular and Islamist...”

In a different vein, Asma Barlas points out that when women read the Quran, seeking to interpret it on their own, they do so, not as subjects of the shariat, but as equal members of the faith. Whereas most male interpretations of the Quran consider justice to be its subject, she argues that equality is as important a concern with the Quran. She defines her own strategies of reading as influenced by her acknowledgement of a multiplicity of readings and the “freedom to choose between them through free and reasoned discourse”. She notes that “in the very connectedness of existential and hermenutical issues … we have a reason to press for just and democratic societies in which we arrive at ever better interpretations of the Quran that can foster the practice of equality.” For women, this means resisting what she calls a “certain rigidity, arrogance and defensiveness bred by both adversity and privilege”, and this, in turn, implies not giving into the calls to heed the basically ahistorical and closed readings of the Quran, advanced as its very core by a scholarship and a clergy that refuses to look beyond the seventh and eighth centuries. For, the Quran itself is the best guarantee against closure: since meanings are to be constantly received and reinterpreted, for the word of God cannot ever be considered frozen in time. As Barlas concludes: “we cannot arrive at the best meanings in the Quran so long as we treat our past as the end of history and thus fail to interrogate it or improve upon it.”

This recourse to the claims of reason and faith, the simultaneity that we witness in arguments that ably shift the civic and the sacred into each other’s realms, the manner in which the Quran is made to signify over and above the shariat, and the agility with which the shariat is refigured as a patriarchal text: these point to a new and distinctive engagement with issues of faith, law and justice.

V

I would like to conclude by returning to the self-respect movement. For self-respecters, the law was a normative guarantee of not merely the good and just, but of a transformed and changing social consciousness. Thus the relationship between the law and the movements that looked to express their anticipation of justice through it was always an uneven one. And, as long as it remained thus, the law did not attract exclusive political or civic attention. With the women’s jamaat, we find that the law is not granted normative value rather it is viewed as an instrument that can impose restraint, serve as a warning and an indictment. For them, normative worth resides elsewhere; in the Quran, as it is learnt, refined, understood in argument and through public conversations. In both instances, the law is always already an incomplete guarantee of the good and just society.

It seems to me that here are several lessons for the women’s movement: we have found it very difficult to engage with normative worldviews that are not sanctioned by secular reason and with a justice that is not expressed through the law. We have feared, and rightly, the implosion of endlessly relative options, sanctioned by local custom or faith or by folk wisdom, even if in practical terms they have resolved issues of equity and justice where the courts and the police fail. On the other hand, though we have not been able to work the courts or the police always to our advantage and so often we are left with a choiceless endorsement of the supremacy of secular law, even when this secularism remains a trope, rather than an active principle. The problem is that we are not able to re-work secularism in an affective, hermenutical sense, for we want it to remain ‘pure’, but unless we bring the existential and hermenutical together and make the one speak to the other, we may not be able to salvage our good faith in secularism.

More notes:

When a jamat elder referred to how Allah had noted women were the cause of all troubles: ‘well, he was a man too…”
To the question of a divorced wife remarrying her husband only after marrying another man and divorcing him: ‘so you want us to sleep with one man and then another, and you are same ones that tell us we must be in purdah. Also, don’t I have a right to choose who I sleep with .,.”
Earlier: the Labbaikidikadu Jamat – ‘you address and reform women through your jamat, we will do the same with men through ours …)
Sharifa: ‘ see right now women want what is guaranteed to them in Islamic law. If at some point they feel that the Quran is also biased against women, who knows, they might reject it as well …’