Muslim Women - Change in the air

By Irum Khan

HNN examines the situation of Muslim women in modern India and discovers hopeful signs.

Pathan Shamim is a taxi driver and thinks nothing of driving for 17 hours at a stretch. She is 30-year-old divorcee, wears her hair in a plait, and supports her son by plying her vehicle between Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Shamim was one of the Muslim women who testified at the public hearing organised by the National Commission for Women (NCW) February. She explained why she does not wear a burqa: "Purdah is not about wearing a burqa; it is about modesty and dignity in one's own eyes.''

One Shamim does not make a revolution, true. But there is no doubting that there are stirrings of change among India's Muslim women as the personal testimonies in 'Voice of the Voiceless', a recent report on the status of Muslim women brought out the National Commission for Women, reveals. Many like Shamim have consciously, and with a rare fortitude, rebuilt lives broken by neglect and tragedy. Women like Sadia of Indore, who resisted torture at the hands of her husband. Not only did she leave him and return to her parents, she ensured that she recovered every article of her dowry from her husband's home.

Questions that were never asked before are now increasingly being articulated. In the NCW's public hearing at Indore, young women students wanted to know why women have to observe purdah and men don't. Why do we allow parents to marry their daughters when they are 14 or 15? Why are boys always placed in front and girls pushed behind? Can we join the army while in purdah? Why does society allow dowry atrocities on women? Why do girls allow themselves to go to pieces if they are deserted by their husbands? The questions were endless. But it was a question raised by a participant in Calcutta that captured this new spirit most significantly: Why is it that when other Quranic injunctions like cutting off the hands of a thief are brushed aside on grounds of human rights and modernity, the rights of women are not in tune with the times?

Zoya Hasan, a Delhi-based academic, who is presently working on a major empirical survey on Muslim women across 10,000 household, along with Ritu Menon, co-founder of Kali, the feminist publishing house, believes that the biggest problem facing the Muslim woman today is their lack of education and employment.

Already there is a perceptible rise in the demand for education. Abdul Waheed, a lecturer in the department of Sociology and Social Work, Aligarh Muslim University, puts it this way, "I did a field study on Muslim Banjaras in a town called Baheri, in Bareilly district. In each and every educational institution there, you will find Muslim girls. They may go to a degree, colleges or appear privately, but education for women is now highly valued something that was just not the case 20 years ago.''

Community leaders are also standing up to be counted in the drive for change. Badar Sayeed, a Chennai-based advocate and former chairperson of the Minorities Commission of Tamil Nadu minced no words when she argued that polygamy should be abolished forthwith. She pointed out that there were as many fatwas as there were ulemas, and laws needed codifcation. In Mumbai, agroup of women had even drafted a standard nikah namah (marriage certificate), in which a woman has the right to divorce her husband if he violates the conditions laid out in the document.

At a public hearing organised by the Institute of Islamic Studies and Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism held in Mumbai two years ago, the overwhelming sentiment was that it was time for the community to stop treating its personal law as something that is immutable.

The resolution passed at the end of this meeting told its own story: "It is resolved to open a dialogue with the Muslim Personal Law Board in connection with necessary reforms in personal law as it operated today in India.'' The resolution pointed out that these laws were enacted by the British and cannot be called Shariat law in the strict sense of the term. It also pointed to the fact that there have been instances when progressive changes had been introduced in the law. For instance, the ulema led by Maulana Ashraf Thanvi had drafted the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939,which had given much needed relief to women whose husbands were missing. There is need for such initiative on the part of the Muslim Personal Law Board even today,'' the resolution noted.

The irony really is that while in India Muslim women have actually been deprived of their rights by laws like the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, under which a divorcee cannot claim maintenance, many Islamic nations including Pakistan and Bangladesh have effected substantive reform in Muslim personal law. In Indonesia, for instance, polygamy has been prohibited, while in Turkey and Tunisia marriage and divorce come under regulatory legislation.

The NCW Report quotes Professor Tahir Mahmood's study, Family Law Reforms inthe Muslim World to point out that in both Pakistan and Bangladesh, polygamy comes under the strict control of courts and administrative bodies. In Pakistan, for instance, under the Family Law Ordinance 1961, polygamy is no longer an unhindered or unchallenged right of men. The written permission of the first wife must be obtained before the second marriage can be contracted. Further, all marriages are registered and therefore cannot be dissolved by triple talaq. Maintenance is recognised as the right of the divorced woman and is not limited to the iddat period, as in India.

Interestingly, in Pakistan the whole impetus for reform came from a rather piquant development. In 1955, news came that Prime Minister Mohammed Ali was planning to marry his Middle Eastern social secretary, while he was legally married to his first wife. Sylvia Chipp-Kraushaar, in a brief history of the All Pakistan Women's Association and the 1961 Muslim Family' Laws Ordinance, included in Gail Minault The Extended Family describes how the protest by women over that marriage snowballed into a movement for reform of marriage laws.

Pakistani women had argued at that time that Islam demanded "equal treatment for all wives'', a condition that could not be logically fulfilled. Chipp-Kraushaar quotes a group of women social workers who had felt that "polygamy was permitted in Islam, not to set up harems, but to save human beings from sin and immorality. We, however, feel that men now find it convenient to flout those mandatory Quranic provisions which make it nearly impossible for a man to take a second wife.''

But reforming personal law in India is bound to be a far more complex process, believes Imtiaz Ahmed, a professor of political sociology in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. "All change is a process of reformist currents vying with conservative ones. Given the external communalisation of society, it becomes that much more difficult for the forces of reform to triumph,'' he says. But he hasn't lost hope given the manner in which women within the community are mobilising for change. ``They are even pressurising the Muslim Law Board to be allowed 33 per cent representation within it. And in the forthcoming meeting of the Board on April 30, the question of the marriage contract is bound to come up,'' says Ahmed.

He also believes that it is important for reformers to engage with the forces of orthodoxy. "Don't end the dialogue. Keep it going,'' he says.