Suchergebnisse

The recent proposed Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill 2017 has raised the new issues, which were long due to Muslim women in India. It has not only criminalised the practice of instant tin talaq (divorce), but also signifies the government's intervention in defining the notion of gender justice to Muslim women. Importantly, this development not only highlights an emerging Muslim women's activism in India but also an articulation of gender justice from within the community. However, an array of criticisms is also sprouting up against the Bill from different corners of the community, including Muslim women's groups. The article is an attempt to address the multiple facets of the Bill; it also argues that the talaq issue alone cannot constitute the core of gender justice rather the interplay of various factors like Hindutva, communal violence and the marginal location of the Muslim community needs to taken into account to understand Muslim women's question in India.

The recent proposed Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill 2017 has raised the new issues, which were long due to Muslim women in India. It has not only criminalised the practice of instant tin talaq (divorce), but also signifies the government's intervention in defining the notion of gender justice to Muslim women. Importantly, this development not only highlights an emerging Muslim women's activism in India but also an articulation of gender justice from within the community. However, an array of criticisms is also sprouting up against the Bill from different corners of the community, including Muslim women's groups. The article is an attempt to address the multiple facets of the Bill; it also argues that the talaq issue alone cannot constitute the core of gender justice rather the interplay of various factors like Hindutva, communal violence and the marginal location of the Muslim community needs to taken into account to understand Muslim women's question in India.

In India, where religion-specific laws govern issues of marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance, the family laws of Muslims – the largest religious minority – have been a thorny issue in the post-independence period. In recent years, the major intervention in Muslim personal law reform came in the form of the invalidation of instant divorce or triple talaq by the Supreme Court of India. Subsequently, a law was passed that criminalised it. By delving into a close examination of recent judicial activism and by drawing on our ethnographic work with Muslim women in India, we show that it is only by refocussing the debate from judicial discourse to legal practice that the trope of Muslim women's victimhood and the tired debates about religious freedom versus citizenship rights can be questioned and bypassed.

The recent case of Shayara Bano v Union of India heard before the Supreme Court of India provide helpful guidance for how a secular democratic regime with a multiplicity of religious, ethnic, and cultural communities can manage constitutional governance with an increasing number of seemingly irreconcilable tensions. Pluralist societies such as Canada and the United States grapple with a variety of delicate balancing acts: in such instance, the need to reconcile accommodation for religious and cultural minorities with the protection of gender rights on the other.

Farah Naqvi with Sadhbhavna Trust, Working with Muslims: Beyond Burqa and Triple Talaq—Stories of Development and Everyday Citizenship in India. New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2018, 416 pp., ₹450, ISBN: 9789383968244.