‘Where Only Women May Judge’: Developing Gender-Just Islamic Laws in India’s All-Female ‘Sharī‘ah Courts’

Jones, Justin

doi:10.1163/15685195-00264p04

Cited by 11 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…The BMMA emerged at a moment of deepening awareness of the marginalisation of Muslim minorities in India and an emergent transnational narrative of Islamic feminism (Jones, 2019: 450). There are two initiatives that constitute BMMA’s activism.…”

Section: The Bmma Islamic Feminism and Women’s Sharia Courts In Indiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper contributes to the literature on Islamic feminism as I show how the everyday social life of Islamic feminist movements eludes the gendered categories of statist legal reform. Existing literature explores how Islamic feminist movements are invested in challenging and reconstituting Islamic legal authority and reforming Muslim family law (Jones, 2019: 441; Mir Hosseini, 2019: 108; Vatuk, 2013: 358). These movements are seen as an effort to challenge patriarchal readings of the Quran and recover its central ethical message as well as discard subsequent misogynist accretions of the hadith and the fiqh (Jones, 2019: 443).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Existing literature explores how Islamic feminist movements are invested in challenging and reconstituting Islamic legal authority and reforming Muslim family law (Jones, 2019: 441; Mir Hosseini, 2019: 108; Vatuk, 2013: 358). These movements are seen as an effort to challenge patriarchal readings of the Quran and recover its central ethical message as well as discard subsequent misogynist accretions of the hadith and the fiqh (Jones, 2019: 443). 3 In the official discourse of these movements, the message of the Quran is translated into a project of codification of a gender-just Muslim personal law (Anwar, 2009: 2; Mir-Hosseini, 2019: 113; Vatuk, 2013: 349).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This tension remains underexplored in the existing scholarship on Islamic feminism and Muslim personal law in India (Jones, 2019; Tschalaer, 2017; Vatuk, 2013). In-depth ethnographic study of the everyday life of the law in women’s sharia courts in India is rare in existing scholarship.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In-depth ethnographic study of the everyday life of the law in women’s sharia courts in India is rare in existing scholarship. Existing scholarship on the BMMA is focused on their institutional demands for legal reform and the interventions of activists to this end (Jones, 2019; Tschalaer, 2017; Vatuk, 2013). Some recent scholarship has explored women’s negotiations with the law in male-run dar-ul-qazas in Delhi and Patna (Lemons, 2019; Redding, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Divorce, kinship, and errant wives: Islamic feminism in India, and the everyday life of divorce and maintenance

Dutta

2021

Ethnicities

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This article is an ethnographic exploration of a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, a part of a network of such courts run by women qazi (Islamic judges) established across India by members of an Islamic feminist movement called the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Indian Muslim Women’s Movement). Building upon observations of adjudication, counselling, and mediation offered in cases of divorce and maintenance by the woman qazi (judge), and the claims made by women litigants on the court, this article explores the imaginaries of the heterosexual family and gendered kinship roles that constitute the everyday social life of Islamic feminism. I show how the heterosexual family is conceptualised as a fragile and violent institution, and divorce is considered an escape route from the same. I also trace how gendered kinship roles in the heterosexual conjugal family are overturned as men fail in their conventional roles as providers and women become breadwinners in the family. In tracing the range of negotiations around the gendered family, I argue that the social life of Islamic feminism eludes the discourses and categories of statist legal reform. I contribute to existing scholarship on Islamic feminism by exploring the tension between the institutionalist and everyday aspects of Islamic feminist movements, and by exploring the range of kinship negotiations around the gendered family that take place in the shadow of the rhetoric of ‘law reform’ for Muslim communities in India.

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Section: The Bmma Islamic Feminism and Women’s Sharia Courts In Indiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Divorce, kinship, and errant wives: Islamic feminism in India, and the everyday life of divorce and maintenance

Dutta

2021

Ethnicities

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Competing Allies: Legal Pluralism, and Gendered Agency in Mumbai’sShariaCourts

Dutta¹

2021

Law Soc. Inq.

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Building upon participant observation in a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, run by activists of an Islamic feminist movement in India, and its networks with similar alternative dispute resolution forums run by male qazis (non-state actors trained in Islamic law and Muslim personal law), this article explores the modalities of interaction between non-state actors who adjudicate Muslim personal law in India. It also delineates how gendered agency is shaped in these interactions. This article identifies three aspects of this interaction between male and female non-state actors: (1) everyday cooperation between male and female qazi despite their doctrinal differences; (2) the gradual assertion of female qazi in and through everyday cooperation with male qazi; and (3) institutional competition interlaced with everyday cooperation. I explore a range of interactions including contestation and collaborative contestation between non-state actors, a domain that has not been explored in existing scholarship on legal pluralism. I also draw attention to how we might think about women’s agency in a legal pluralist context beyond a straightforward challenge to male authority and as it is forged at the intersection of individuals, interactions, and institutions. Through a critical exploration of women’s agency, I show how women both inhabit and transform gender norms at an individual and institutional level in their interactions with non-state actors and institutions, expanding scholarship on legal pluralism and gender beyond reified “women’s interests.”

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‘Acting upon our Religion’: Muslim women's movements and the remodelling of Islamic practice in India

Jones¹

2020

Mod. Asian Stud.

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In the last 15 years, India has witnessed the expression of a variety of new non-conformist religious practices performed by Muslim women. A range of vibrant campaigns has been pioneered by Muslim women's associations, asserting women's claims to hold and lead congregational prayers, enter and manage mosques, visit shrines, officiate Muslim marriages, and issue shari‘ah-based legal decisions. This article explores the twin questions of why these experimental remodellings of women's Islamic observance and leadership have been so pronounced in the Indian context compared with much of the Islamic world, and furthermore, why Muslim women's rights activists have put such confessional matters at the centre of their work. Exploring a series of specific female-led assertions of religious agency centring upon mosques, shari‘ah councils, and a Sufi shrine, the article argues that India's variant of ‘secularism’, which has normalized the state's non-intervention in religious institutions and laws, has given women the freedom to embark upon overhauls of Islamic conventions denied to their counterparts elsewhere. Simultaneously, this same framework for handling religious questions has historically given intra-community and clerical voices particular influence in regulating Muslim community affairs and family laws, compelling activists to seek women's empowerment in individual and local community contexts to further their objectives, including through the assertion of experimental forms of religious conduct.

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‘Where Only Women May Judge’: Developing Gender-Just Islamic Laws in India’s All-Female ‘Sharī‘ah Courts’

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Divorce, kinship, and errant wives: Islamic feminism in India, and the everyday life of divorce and maintenance

Divorce, kinship, and errant wives: Islamic feminism in India, and the everyday life of divorce and maintenance

Competing Allies: Legal Pluralism, and Gendered Agency in Mumbai’sShariaCourts

‘Acting upon our Religion’: Muslim women's movements and the remodelling of Islamic practice in India

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