Abstract
The question of Muslim women’s activism has been a topic of discussion within and beyond the academic space alike, particularly at moments or flashpoints where law, activism and state intervention have intersected. However, it has received limited serious academic attention, and when it has done so, it has followed certain pre-existing norms which have not been successfully challenged: the most significant one being the unquestioned binary of personal, non-state law and what is seen as the modern, secular-legal system of law. Particularly in the aftermath of the Shah Bano case, this binary was reified rather than questioned in feminist literature on the subject of personal law and Muslim women’s rights. This ended up pitting an apparently oppressed (and homogenous) minority within a minority of Muslim women versus their oppressive, patriarchal and orthodox male ‘clergy’, particularly with reference to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). These complex formulations have often been used very easily, especially when what is seen as an irrevocably illiberal religion—Islam—is squarely seen through a modernist reading which cannot but attempt to rescue, even if discursively and textually, Muslim women from their ‘inherent’ oppression. In this bleak landscape, Mengia Hong Tschalaer’s book, Muslim Women’s Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India is a much-needed break as well as a serious academic effort which breaks new ground, in a time where some refreshing work is finally being done in the realm of personal law, Muslim women and legal pluralism and activism.
The book is a multi-sited ethnography within the city scape of Muslim women’s organisations in Lucknow, including the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB), and the Bazme Khawateen (Women’s Club). It also examines in its later chapters organisations like the All India Shia Personal Law Board (AISPLB), multiple darul qazas (Shari‘a courts) and goes into a detailed examination of attempts at pluralising the nikahnama (marriage contract) by some of these organisations. Divided into six chapters, and an appendix which looks at model nikahnamas by AIMPLB, AISPLB, AIMWPLB and BMMA, the book showcases the author’s fluency in dealing with and switching between the myriad intertwined threads that such legal pluralism has produced in contemporary India. The author also provides a detailed historical and theoretical background to the question of Muslim women’s activism, including the histories of the codification of Muslim personal law, the debates around the uniform civil code and colonial histories which shape the existing forms of legal systems today.
The methodological approach used by Tschalaer works well with the subject of choice, which is that of questioning legal hegemonies, both that of the state and those embedded within the extant literature of academic debates around personal law. As she explores, even within the forms of Muslim women’s activism within a single city like Lucknow, there is immense variation and contradiction between the ways different Muslim women who are interviewed have shaped their organisations, their own personal beliefs, and their relationship to not just the state and the law, but to the existing arbiters of non-state personal law. The chapter on Muslim women’s respectability also delves into the ‘personal’ aspect of these formulations and formations, where many of the activists are interviewed on the re-shaping of their personal selves in the light of their activism in the public sphere of Muslim activism in Lucknow. The overarching argument of Tschalaer’s work is a clear running thread throughout the text and is not lost even as she delves sometimes into very microscopic ethnographic details which are rendered necessary due to the nature of her research. The efforts of these activists have challenged hegemonic legal understandings of Muslim personal law, and displays the reality of the existing forms of legal pluralism rather than glossing over them as many have previously done by painting both Islam as illiberal and inflexible to heterodox interpretations, and by painting human rights in a purely Western, liberal and modernist framework. The author is also careful not to fall into the trap of merely labelling these women as Islamic feminists, which would be a simplistic reduction of their politics. Tschalaer’s work will be important not just for academics studying personal law but also for those who are interested in the question of legal pluralism as a broader question beyond this realm. She concludes her work by offering some direct policy relevant recommendations—arguing for a thick reading of adjudication in postcolonial states, pushing for NGOs, women’s and human rights groups to set aside their prejudices (of which she candidly and self-reflexively admits, she also had plenty at the beginning of her work), forms of community-based justice which do not fit into their secular-liberal understandings of justice and for activists to use these heterogeneities to create innovative formulations for justice at the grassroots level.
Nevertheless, Tschalaer’s work does retain some binaries even as it disclaims them and attempts to speak in a language of heterogeneity. There still exists a clear division, both linguistically and ideologically, between progressive and regressive, orthodox and heterodox formulations for Tschalaer, which also becomes clearer in her interactions with the darul qazas and her visible comfort with more ‘secular’ formulations like the BMMA. Also, despite the emphasis on multi-sited ethnography, there is an absence of the voices of Muslim women’s activists from the major Muslim organisations in the city, including Islamic organisations, which have active women members whose opinions and voices might have provided an even sharper and more intimate critique to the secular hegemonies of grassroots politics than the existing sample has done. Similarly, the use of the word ‘clergy’ for qazis and other such figures betrays a simplistic assumption that there exists a clergy within Islam, akin to Christianity. The author also seems to be making large scale generalisations on the nature of Muslim weddings (appearance, dress, and jewellery worn, for example) from a sample that is only based in Lucknow; it is ironic that there is this turn towards homogenisation while speaking of legal pluralism. These flaws aside, the text provides for a refreshing and welcome change in the existing literature on personal law, especially due to its self-reflexivity and willingness to critique the liberal secular models of reading Islamic law.