The Hindu Business Line : The double-minority syndrome

The majority of the Muslim women who are uneducated and economically dependent are often referred to as a minority within a minority, suffering the double handicap of their gender as well as the oppression of their male-dominated religion. It is time a movement was begun to scrap the archaic laws on polygamy and talaq, and give education of Muslim women much greater importance.

Kashmiri women at the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar... Praying for deliverance?

IN RESPONSE to the article `The portents in Gujarat' (Business Line, December 18), which had recommended that the exploitation of Muslim women by its own community should be checked by measures such as a Uniform Civil Code, a reader, Mr R. Subramonian, has written to say that women's education, particularly Muslim women's education, should be accorded greater importance.

"How many Muslim women have proper education? I think the community should also take the blame to a great extent. I would like to point out that 40 years ago when I used to travel by train in North Malabar, the Muslim women never wore purdah. They had their own head-dress and were respected. Now in the trains you find Muslim women wearing the burqa. What do you call this? Progress in our society or Islamic fundamentalism?," he writes.

Of course, the community is largely to blame for the plight of Muslim women, the majority of whom remain uneducated and economically dependent. They are, quite rightly, often referred to as "minority within a minority" for suffering the double handicap of their gender as well as their religious faith in a world that looks at Islam itself with a question mark, post 9/11.

In India, the tribulations of Muslim women in a State like Gujarat, where the VHP brand of Hindutva raises its ugly head now and then, as it did in the March 2002 riots, increases manifold. Not only are they the victims of the orthodoxies of their own religion, where the all-male clergy rules supreme, but are much more vulnerable than Muslim men, during communal riots.

And here, the tragedy of our times is that, be it the Dalit or the Adivasi or the Muslim woman, when men settle scores among themselves, whether over land disputes, inter-caste marriages or differences in religious ideologies, the woman's body is often made the battleground. The male `victors' have a strange way of showing their power and superiority and that is through raping the women from the opposite camp. But returning to the exploitation of the Muslim women within their community, the overthrowing of the Shah Bano judgment and reversal of the Supreme Court's judgment on maintenance for divorced Muslim women through a legislation brought about by Rajiv Gandhi, who gave in to the pressure from the mullahs and the Muslim MPs, is well-known.

But over the years, our courts have occasionally refused to be daunted by the Muslim Women's Law. They have, time and again, through other laws of the land that are common to all Indian women, provided relief to that rare Muslim woman. Such a woman, however, would have displeased the clergy and her own family members, and antagonised the Muslim society in approaching the courts for relief.

In such a decision in October, the apex court ruled that one Zaibunnisa's husband — who refused to look after her, saying he had divorced her years ago and, hence, need not pay any maintenance — should either produce evidence of the talaq or pay maintenance. This is bound to bring a lot of relief to thousands of Muslim women who are simply abandoned by their husbands, who take on new wives. Unfortunately, the law of polygamy that allows them to do so legally, does not necessitate the pronouncing of talaq.

It was reported that Zaibunnisa, who lived in a Lucknow suburb, was being helped by the residents of the locality to run her house for a year, after her husband married another woman without divorcing her. When the abandoned woman approached the court for maintenance, the man conveniently claimed he had given her talaq under the Muslim law.

As talaq can be given quite casually, and with the blessings of mullahs, many men who have not even bothered to pronounce the three dreaded words "talaq, talaq, talaq", submit before the courts that the divorce had indeed been given.

Is it not time the intellectuals within the community began a movement for scrapping of polygamy in a day and age when it has neither any relevance nor necessity. Are not Indian Muslims hanging on to this because it gives men the option to have four wives, and not vice-versa? Many Islamic countries — Turkey, for instance — have brought about radical changes in this concept and it is time that Indian Muslim women demanded its ban. If nothing else, Muslims can escape such barbs as paanch ke pacchees.

But a ray of hope emerges from the fact that, apart from seeking legal remedies on the maintenance front, Muslim women, though few and scattered, have been holding their own and fighting for their rights, often creating an uproar of opposition from the community.

One such case was reported from Delhi, when the Muslim principal of a school, Ms Safia Iqbal, created a ruckus when she insisted on running her school — The Scholar's School — on secular principles, providing modern education to children living in a Muslim-dominated locality in Delhi.

Apparently, one of the trustees of the school, Mohammed Shafi Moonis, also a vice-president of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, tried to bring in the Islamic fundamentalist ideology in the running of the school.

But Ms Iqbal put her foot down, saying that she would not allow her school to be converted into a madrassa. She finally had her way. Fortunately, she got support from another Islamic organisation, the Darul-Uloom, which issued a fatwa against Mr Moonis for his attempts to derail the school from the right track on which the principal was taking it. In another development that is blatantly against women, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board decided, a few months ago, to oppose the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, which makes 18 years as the minimum age at which a girl can be married.

Commenting on such retrograde steps, Mr Ram Puniyani, a Professor at IIT Mumbai and a member of Ekta, the Mumbai-based Committee for Communal Amity, said in a column on the Web site India Together (www.indiatogether.org): "One must concede that the trishul-wielders are the prime movers of communal politics today, while the mullahs and law boards of this ilk provide the ammunition to offensive communal politics. The nation needs neither of these. In current times the communal violence, in which Muslims are often the larger victims of the violence, aggravates the conservatism in both communities, more so among the Muslims. Every riot leaves the mullahs in a stronger position."

He goes on to describe how in the aftermath of the Mumbai riots the "Muslim womens' struggle for abolition of triple talaq, polygamy and burqa received a big setback. It did take long before the local groups working in this direction could regain the rhythm of their work for reforms among the community. In the struggle for preservation of democratic norms, minority rights has no meaning if the rights of women are not taken up with utmost sincerity."

But it is not only in India that Muslim women are at the receiving end from, both from their own community as well as hard-core majoritarian politics. On November 10, 2002, the London Observer carried a report on how the `Dutch Salman Rushdie', a Muslim woman who had dared to criticise the exploitation of women in Islam, created a furore and was forced to flee The Netherlands to save her life.

The report said that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a 32-year-old Somali-born Muslim immigrant to the Netherlands, launched a frontal attack on Islam, which she had rejected.

The subject of her attack was the mullahs and the fundamentalists, and she described on national television "the cruelty and abuse meted out to many Muslim women living in Western societies.

Calling Islam a `backward' religion, she claimed that orthodox Muslim men frequently indulge in domestic violence against women as well as incest and child abuse. To make matters worse, she added, such unacceptable behaviour is routinely covered up and never spoken about." The hate campaign that was unleashed against her and the death threats she got, received a lot of support from the Muslim fundamentalists in the country, and their task became easier because she had "turned her back on Allah". The woman said she had rejected Islam because it had failed to protect women from such abuse and humiliation.

Such cases are, and will remain, extremely rare because it is not the religion that is to blame, but the twisting of its edicts and traditional practices by the clergy and their male followers, to keep women under `control', and prevent their minds from developing through education. Only the educated and the aware ask questions that tend to be extremely uncomfortable. At the end of the day, don't all equations end with the single word: Power?

(Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)

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