The very recent phenomenon called Islamic feminism receives quite a lot of attention

from academia and media alike. Although it is basically a discourse whose strategy

and praxis is primarily script related, there seems to be an overt tendency to equate Islamic

feminism with an

For quite some time, the renewed orientation of many Muslims worldwide towards

the normative sources of their religion has been equated with a perceived quest for

the legitimacy of an “anti-Western,” “dogmatic” or “rigid” Islam. That this is not necessarily

the agenda behind it becomes very clear when one looks at recent developments in

India. Faced with enormous political, social and economic challenges, more and more

active “lay” Muslims in India are engaging in fresh interpretations of the Islamic tradition,

which for them as

the majority community or society in general and not detach them from it any further.

This effort is not restricted to a tiny minority of Muslim intellectuals, as it is supported,

for example, by sections of the newly emerging Muslim middle class in India and

many grass-roots movements all over the country. One could even argue that the discussion

of burning questions, such as education, reform, the political representation of Indian

Muslims, and above all the legal and social status of Muslim women, has led to the emergence

of a new public sphere in India in recent years which, in turn, is linked to many

other transnational and/or local Muslim publics (see Eickelman and Anderson 1999 and

Salvatore/Eickelman 2004). As Sikand points out, the language of this new Muslim public

sphere is English, not Urdu, which may be one of the reasons why it has gone largely

unnoticed by the academic community so far, since Urdu is still regarded by many as the

preferred language of Indian Muslim discourse (Sikand 2006).

These new Muslim actors in local, national, and transnational spaces argue that

believing Muslims do not depend on religious authorities in order to understand the Koran,

but that they can rather and should indeed read and interpret the Koran for themselves.

Thus, like other contemporary reform movements

be seen as an answer to the perceived crisis of religious authority as well as the crisis of

(political) representation, on the local, national and global level (see for instance Göle

2002 and 2004, Sharify-Funk 2004, Mahmood 2005 and 2006, and Krämer/Schmitdke

2006).

Especially with regard to India, not much attention has been paid to this discursive

movement so far. This holds true also with regard to the emerging Muslim women’s

rights movement in India that came to life in the aftermath of the heated controversy on

the religion-based personal laws for Muslims in India in the 1980s (Muslim Personal

Law). Much more than in its initial phase, this emancipatory movement seems to be informed

by and draw a lot of inspiration from the global discourse of Islamic feminism,

which gained momentum in the 1990s (see for instance Badran 2007, Barlas 2002, Wadud

2006 and Moghadam 2007). Hence their claim to reform gender unjust laws within

Muslim Personal Law is not necessarily based on the Indian constitution

principle of human rights, but first and foremost on the authority of the Koran. The central

argument of Islamic feminism is that the Koran guarantees a number of rights to

women, which are constantly denied to them as a consequence of prevailing patriarchal

interpretations.

As a perceived

“Muslim feminism” and “Islamist feminism”. With regard to India, however, I will argue

in this article that these ideal types are not very helpful as analytical categories, since the

growing influence and reference to Islamic feminism simply cannot be associated with

one distinct group of proponents or one movement exclusively. Therefore, I will suggest

that a distinction should rather be made between Islamic feminism as a

and the distinct organizations or movements that are

and hence to focus more on the enormous potential that Islamic feminism has for Muslim

women’s subjectivity and agency in India.

According to Moghadam, Islamic feminism is first and foremost a discourse

whose strategy and praxis is primarily script related (Moghadam 2007). Nevertheless,

there seems to be a clear tendency among observers to equate this discursive strategy or

praxis with an

political movement, or - as the critics of Islamic feminism maintain - that is bound to fail

in this respect. Accordingly, it is often stated that the Islamic feminist

with “ideological divisions”, a “weak interconnectedness”, “internal conflicts”

among Islamic feminists and “divisions weakening the movement as a whole” or with

“frictions inside the movement” (Vatuk 2008)

on the idea of a more or less coherent, singular movement grounded in Islamic feminism.

I will argue here, however, that in the specific Indian context, the very recent

emergence of Islamic feminism can be best understood as a discursive praxis that is

adapted by women’s rights activists who, in many cases, have already been associated

with local/regional or national women’s movements

movements and organizations alike, such as the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (JIH)

we can observe in India and elsewhere, the increased turning of certain groups within

these distinct movements to the global discourse of Islamic feminism does not mean that

they become sort of “natural allies”. Nor does it necessarily imply that these actors and

different local movements feel the need to build networks or develop a common agenda,

not to mention a singular movement.

Hence, rather than conceptualizing Islamic feminism as an ideology or category

for a transnational social or political movement, it is considered here a

or

is corroborated by the fact that many Muslim women’s rights activists who draw

upon this discourse would never accept the label “feminist” or “Islamic feminist” as it

still has a negative or ambiguous connotation in non-Western contexts

Abou-Bakr 2001 and Barlas 2005).

Until very recently, observers were not at all convinced that Islamic feminism

would ever come to light in India. In the eyes of Asghar Ali Engineer (2008) and Zarina

Bhatty (2003), for instance, two essential preconditions for the long overdue appearance

of an Islamic gender critique in India were missing, firstly a qur’anic hermeneutics based

on gender equality and, secondly, the inclusion of Muslim women in women’s and gender

studies (Engineer 2006, Bhatty 2003). Regarding the latter deficit, Tahera Aftab (2008)

argues in her groundbreaking bibliography “Inscribing South Asian Muslim women” that

studies on the history and contemporary situation of Muslim women in South Asia are

generally scarce. According to Aftab, South Asian Muslim women are generally

represented as “oppressed”, “backward” and “victims of the double tyranny” of their religion

and the specifically South Asian form of patriarchy which is grounded in the traditional

Hindu view of femininity (Aftab 2008). Historians like Gail Minault (1998), Barbara

Metcalf (1990) and Azra Asghar Ali (2000) - to mention just a few - have shown

that Muslim women and men alike have constantly strived for new or re-definitions of

existing women’s rights since the second half of the 19

Among them were and are until today many eminent writers and poetesses of the 20

21

just these few. At present, the poetic voices (and sociopolitical actions) of Tamil author

and poet Salma

12

on an international level.

construction of the Muslim woman as a “passive victim” by putting forward differentiated

narratives and alternative images, the stereotypes seem to persist, especially in India.

As Nigar Ataulla, editor of India’s largest-selling English-language Islamic magazine

“Inscribing” Muslim women into the grand narratives or making them more visible

as social actors thus remains a very difficult undertaking. What makes it even more

problematic is the fact that Muslims in India are still seen as an obvious community that

draws its specificity from an inhe">others, by Hindu nationalist actors who called for the substitution of existing religionbased

personal laws by a Uniform Civil Code as envisaged by the Indian constitution. In

the course of the debate, it became clear that this “secular” civil code would in fact resemble

more or less the already existing Hindu Code, since secularism for the representatives

of Hindu nationalism in the context of this debate meant “secularism in a Hindu

way” (see Schneider 2005:244ff.). Moreover, the avowed commitment to an overarching

civil law code was increasingly equated with a “commitment to the nation”. Muslim

groups and individuals who argued for the retention of Muslim Personal Law as an

integral part of their cultural rights were subsequently not only branded as “backward”

and “misogynist” but increasingly also as “anti-national” and “unwilling to integrate” into

Indian society (Schneider 2005:216ff.).

Faced with the growing polarization about this question, the Congress government

under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi somewhat hastily adopted the so-called Muslim

Women (Rights of Protection on Divorce) Bill in 1986. The law gave Muslim personal

law priority over criminal law in maintenance issues, and by doing so effectively excluded

Muslim women from seeking criminal procedure. By adopting this law, the Indian

state also put an end to the repeated attempt of Muslim women since the 1980s to obtain

maintenance under secular jurisdiction (Chhachhi 1999). It was thus the Indian state itself

that, which by its legislative power, sought to re-establish and re-confirm the patriarchal,

religiously justified control over Muslim women, as Chhachhi argues. It seems important

to me to highlight this aspect, especially with respect to the controversy on Islamic feminism

and the oft-repeated critique that it represents a “compromise with patriarchy”

(see Moghissi 1999, Mojab 2001).

Regarding the development in India, one could rather argue that it is above all due

to this entanglement between state intervention and patriarchal claims to power on the

part of Muslim organizations like the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board, that Muslim

women’s rights activists were forced to look for new ways to engage with religious and

political discourse and to seek legitimacy

departure that recent feminist thinking in India stresses the necessity and possibility of

reform

achieve gender-just laws.

For the secular women’s movement, which had gained strength since the 1970s,

the Muslim Women Bill marked a watershed-moment in its postcolonial history. For secular

women’s rights activists, the whole agitation over Muslim women’s rights on maintenance

contained a series of bitter lessons of experience (Kumar 1995). Starting with the

seeming ease with which the Indian state had bowed to the communitarian agenda, to the

disregard for a key principle of liberalism, namely that religiously defined rights and religious

freedom must not supersede individual rights. For many decades, the diverse secular

women’s movement in India had been united by the idea that the State should encourage

the society’s cultural, social and political progress through legislation and thereby

strengthen “national integration”. This is also the reason for the movement’s longstanding

support for the claim for an overarching Civil Law code in India. And this, on

the other hand, explains the appearance of a very peculiar argumentative alliance with

regard to Muslim personal law in the 1980s, which was, among others, supported by extremist

Hindu nationalist organizations such as the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the Rashtriya

Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and parts of the Indian women’s movement (Schneider

2005:188 and 289).

Initial doubts with respect to the secular nation-state came up only in the context

of the general critique of secularism from the mid-1980s onwards. Following this critique,

the elitist assumption that social change and progress were inherent to the process of

nation-building, was now more and more challenged. Faced with the appropriation of

their claim for an overarching Civil Law Code by Hindu nationalist actors, these doubts

grew stronger in the aftermath of the Shah Bano case. Especially the critique of wellknown

women’s rights activists such as Madhu Kishwar

important in this context. The disillusionment with the state and the realization that Hindu

nationalist actors had more or less seized a genuine feminist demand led to a growing

dissociation of feminist actors from this agenda. As a result of this, the claim for a Uniform

Civil Code seems to be no longer supported by major women’s organizations in India

at present (Hasan 1999:138). It remains a debated issue, however, which strategies

should be best followed in order to achieve greater gender equality under the existing religion-

based laws, i.e. Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi Laws.

Contrary to the experience of the secular women’s movement in India, the Shah Bano

case and the adoption of the Muslim Women Bill represent a point of departure for the

emerging Muslim women’s rights movement in postcolonial India and a very recent phenomenon

that is labeled as Islamic feminism. Many local Muslim women’s rights groups

and initiatives were founded in the late 1980s, such as the Goa Muslim Women’s Association

or Awaaz-e-Niswan in Mumbai. Although many of these organizations have been

active for more than 20 years, the English-language press in India, for instance, has only

started to cover their activities and agenda to a significant extent from the late 1990s onwards

(Schneider 2008). Especially during the last three years, quite a number of reports

and interviews with Muslim women’s rights activists have been published. Many of these

articles put a focus on Muslim women’s organizations and activists who

question religious authorities, especially the Ulama,

1) strive for reforms of existing laws within the framework of Muslim Personal Law

in order to strengthen the rights of Muslim women,

2) are planning to found a mosque for women,

3) point out that Islam as a religion does not discriminate or oppress women but rather

the patriarchal system that has been established on the basis of a highly selective

interpretation of the normative sources, especially the Koran.

Against the background of the absence of Muslim women from media discourse and

their clichéd representation as “passive victims” of violence and discrimination within

their religious community, the increasing visibility of self-conscious Muslim women’s

rights activists in Indian public spheres may indeed be seen as a surprise. More correctly,

one could perhaps speak of a

(1996). Luhmann argues that one of the basic principles of modern mass media is that

they always rely on what has been publicized before and thus concentrate on specific variations

of what is already known (in German: “das Bekanntsein des Bekanntseins”, Luhmann

1996). In that sense, the sudden representation of Muslim women’s rights activists

in the Indian English-language media may well be regarded as a media-specific surprise

since they are depicted as an “unexpected and new variation” in the all too well known

narrative on Muslim women in India that has persisted for decades.

Having said that, it is important to note that these new actors are not simply “discovered”

by journalists who are looking for new stories, but that Muslim women’s rights

groups have also actively developed new public relations strategies for themselves and

established good relations with the media in order to attain more attention for their agenda.

And this increased media activism on their part could also help to explain why representations

of Muslim feminist thinking and activism in the Indian media have become

more frequent only very recently. Nonetheless, it remains a highly ambiguous relationship

for many Muslim women’s rights activists in India, as the predominantly negative

and biased representation of the Muslim minority in Indian mass media has been and until

the day continues to be a very central issue of concern and debate among Indian Muslims

(Attaulla 2007).

From local grass-roots activism to nationwide agenda setting: Muslim women’s

rights activism and the struggle for legal reform

It becomes quite clear from Vatuk’s (2008) pioneering ethnographic study of

Muslim women’s organizations in India that very few, if any, of them were initially

founded in order to pursue the goal of legal reforms, nor to create more publicity for the

Islamic feminist agenda. Most of them rather seem to have emerged from local grassroots

initiatives, which are so typical for the vital civil society in India. Vatuk (2008), for

example, describes that the main activities of the largest and best-known organization led

by Muslim women, Awaaz-e-Niswan (AeN), concentrate around the professional education

of poor women with the goal of enabling them to make a living for themselves and

their children. In addition to that, AeN offers marriage counseling on a weekly basis.

These services are not only available to Muslim women exclusively. Nor does the way in

which this counseling is carried out refer to a specific Muslim tradition, but rather follows

a pattern which according to Vatuk is very typical for the world of feminist or women’s

NGOs in India (Vatuk 2008).

For these grass-roots initiatives, the increasing cooperation and networking of

Muslim women’s organizations on a national and even on an international level seems to

be a more recent phenomenon. In these new contexts, the focus is not so much laid on

help for individual women, but rather on a dialogue within the Muslim community, especially

with the Ulama. As mentioned before, media campaigns and public relations strategies

play a significant role on this level of activism: for example, when resolutions are

passed on big conferences, they are immediately forwarded to the press and interview

partners are made available. These organizations and networks often coordinate demonstrations

in cooperation with secular women’s organizations, and they organize so-called

legal awareness camps for poor women in rural areas or urban slums as well as protest

actions against so-called “anti-women fatwas” which mostly receive a lot of publicity

(Engineer 2005).

The All-India Muslim Women’s Rights Network (MWRN), which was founded

in 1999 by activists from AeN and from the Mumbai-based Women’s Research and Action

Group (WRAG), is the most successful network with a nationwide radius. Every one

or two years, they hold conferences, which at the same time serve as a meeting point for

all the organizations which are active in this network. For instance, in 2005, about 300

delegates met in Lucknow and discussed questions such as the role of the State with respect

to women’s rights, the effects of communal violence on Muslim women and the

challenges that Muslim women’s rights activists are facing in India right now.

Between 1994-98, WRAG conducted an extensive study titled “Women & Law in

the Muslim Community”, with the declared aim of collecting, documenting and analyzing

the diverse civil or family laws that are applied to Muslims in India. It is often overlooked

that the term Muslim Personal Law does not refer to a codified or unified family

law code and that laws may differ more or less significantly from region to region (see

Mahmood 1986, 1993). One of the findings of this research project was that Muslim

women in India clearly support the demand for reform of Muslim Personal Law in India

(Nainar 2000). As WRAG describes on its homepage, it was this claim, which among

other things, led to an increase in awareness-rising campaigns, which shall help to inform

Muslim women about the rights that are guaranteed to them in the Koran and thereby encourage

new impulses for debate on reform of MPL.

name of Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) was founded for this specific goal.

BMMA claims to be the first pan-Indian movement uniting Muslim women across the

various existing castes and classes in Muslim Indian society. It is this organization that

most explicitly states its reference to the global discourse of Islamic feminism in the formulation

of goals by declaring that BMMA strives “to explore possibilities of reforming

personal laws based on male dominance”.

From the self-description and development of Muslim women’s organizations in

Mumbai, it becomes very clear that they are increasingly influenced by the discourse of

Islamic feminism. At the same time, many of them remain firmly rooted in local grassroots

initiatives and they also regard themselves as an integral part of the national women’s

movement in India.

A very similar development can be observed with regard to the well-known South

Indian women’s organization STEPS which was founded by Daud Sharifa Khanam in

Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu in 1987. Like the Mumbai-based organization Awaaz-e-

Niswan, STEPS was not founded for Muslim women exclusively. Interestingly, STEPS

dedicates a lot of space on its website to the self-description of the organization, its origins,

motives and goals. According to this account, STEPS was originally founded to

fight against the discrimination of and violence against young girls and women. In 2003,

the organization announced its intention to establish a monthly

women in order to provide them with a public space for articulation

about the patriarchal interpretation of Islamic principles by male religious authorities.

This idea of a

among Muslim women in Pudukottai about the decisions that are made by the (exclusively

male) Jamaat members regarding questions of dowry, divorce, domestic violence, custody

or child abuse. Provided that Muslim women even go to the local police station and

seek help there, most of their complaints are transferred by police officers to the local

Jamaat to which women have no access. Which means that the Jamaats make their opinion

without even listening to the women and as a result of this, the judgments passed by

them are often biased and one-sided (Bhatty 2008, Subramanian 2008).

In other words, by declaring their intention to found their own

women, STEPS activists fundamentally question the authority of the traditional Jamaat

system as well as the legitimacy of its claim to exert control on the Muslim community.

What attracted a remarkable amount of media attention in this context, was the plan of

these

erected on a site that had been donated to them especially for this purpose. Besides the

prayer room and a coordination office for questions related to education or job vacancies

for women, the

on Islamic law and jurisprudence. While Khanam and her fellow-activists have

experienced a lot of support and media attention during the last two years, they are at the

same time faced with massive resistance on the part of conservative Ulama all over India

and have received several death threats.

Access to mosques for women, not only in the sense of a place for prayer but as a

“Islamic” feminism but should rather be seen as a hybrid construction - in theory and

practice (Ahmed-Ghosh 2008).

The question is, however, if this can be applied to the emergence of Islamic feminist

thinking and activism within Islamic revivalist groups such as the Jamaat-e-Islami

Hind as well? Or should we rather assume that the oft-cited assertion that Islamic feminism

is an unwanted, albeit legitimate, child of political Islam simply does not hold true

for India?

Islamic or “Islamist” organizations like the JIH were among the strongest proponents

of a return to the normative sources of Islam and have thereby unknowingly created

the precondition for Islamic feminism. The discourse of Islamic feminism is also based

on the interpretation of the scriptural sources, although obviously not from a patriarchal

or neo-patriarchal perspective, but from the perspective of gender justice. And this is exactly

the reason why Islamic feminism has been called the “unwanted child of political

Islam” by Ziba Mir-Hosseini

of political Islam, as theoreticians of this discourse like Mir-Hosseini argue, a feminist

qur’anic hermeneutics could surely be expected to emerge from within Islamic or

“Islamist” groups such as the Jamaat-e-Islami (JIH) Hind, too. And indeed, there seems

to be some evidence that such a development is actually also taking place inside the JIH.

For example, when approximately 30.000 followers of the women’s wing of the JIH gathered

in Hyderabad in February 2006, Nasira Khanum, the president of this suborganization

was quoted saying: “Islam advocates protection of women rights but mendominated

society hides the facts. Women themselves should know about their rights and

learn to snatch them if denied”.

Anwaar, state Jamaat chief, that the organization would enroll women members in a

big way to take up various issues confronting the woman today.

Interestingly, Vatuk states that by using this markedly feminist rhetoric, “the

leader of a religiously orthodox Islamist mass organization (…) essentially echoes what

the leaders of so many much smaller organizations with longstanding and serious commitments

to the pursuit of feminist goals, have been striving for two decades to communicate

to the Muslim clerical establishment and the Muslim community at large” (Vatuk

2008:518). So is it merely a “derivative discourse”, to quote the famous phrase coined by

Partha Chatterjee (1993), or does it represent a distinct development that has taken place

within the JIH?

Contrary to Vatuk’s (2008) assessment, Ahmad (2008) offers a very different

perspective on this question. He uses the concept of Islamic feminism as an analytical

category for what he calls a “transformative movement within Islamist groups in India”.

In his view, this current grew stronger especially in the years following Maududi’s death

in 1979, and it was reinforced by the emergence of critical voices and a new generation

that began questioning Maududi’s “neo-patriarchal and misogynist ideology” (Ahmad

2008). In the 1990s, these voices had finally become so strong that they had coined a new

critical language that could be labeled as Islamic feminism.

Thus, it becomes clear that the local dynamics of the transnational discourse of Islamic

feminism in India display some unexpected features that have not been taken into

consideration so far and certainly need to be analyzed in greater detail. I would argue,

however, that further research on Islamic feminism in India should not be conceptualized

on a “national” level exclusively. Especially with respect to the two South Asian sister

organisations of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in Pakistan and Bangladesh, i.e. Jamaat-e-

Islami Pakistan and Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, there seem to be some interesting parallels,

but also some significant differences that need be discussed more systematically in a

comparative study of the dynamics of Islamic feminism in South Asia.

Conclusion

From the literature that has been published on Islamic feminism in India so far, it

seems that a twofold dilemma manifests itself on a theoretical-conceptual level. Firstly, it

has to be taken into account that many social actors who are subsumed under the category

“Islamic feminist”, would not necessarily accept this label for themselves, and this holds

true not only with respect to India but also to Muslim women’s rights activists in other

countries. And secondly, I would argue that a clear distinction should be made between

Islamic feminism as a

based on texts, and the local, national or transnational movements that are now

making use of this discursive praxis, but in many cases actually precede the emergence of

Islamic feminism in the 1990s. By making this distinction, the focus of analysis can be

shifted from the repeated finding of “ideological divisions and frictions” within an assumed,

singular Islamic feminist movement to the focus on the “unifying potential” that

this discourse may or may not possess for the different actors in women’s movements and

Islamic groups and perhaps even more importantly, to the question of their agency vis-àvis

established religious authorities.

Notwithstanding this important differentiation, it is an indisputable fact that Islamic

feminism as a discourse and strategy has become a very important point of reference

for different groups and contexts in India. For the time being, the achievement of

gender equality within the framework of Muslim Personal Law in India is certainly not in

reach yet, and especially the tedious attempt to convince Ulama that gender-just rights are

an imperative is exhausting for many Muslim women’s rights activists. Ever since the

foundation of the All-India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB) in February

2005, however, which attracted a lot of media attention in India and beyond, it can

hardly be ignored any longer that Muslim women in India have an increasingly audible

voice in the newly emerging Muslim public sphere. Like many of their male counterparts,

they encourage believing Muslims to read and to interpret the Koran for themselves and

to find new ways to bring their religious belief in accordance with the prerequisites of

today’s life. And perhaps even more pronounced, Muslim women argue that the “modernization”

and future of the Muslim minority heavily depends on the achievement of

gender equality within the community

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