DIVERSE VOICES OF FEMINISM

DIVERSE VOICES OF FEMINISM

Lecture in SIES College, Mumbai

18 February 2019

The reason behind starting Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan [BMMA] was to include the diverse voices within the women’s movement; voices that have been neglected, voices that have not been heard. BMMA helped in bringing a structure to that voice, to make it more organic, systematic so that the community and governments can hear them.  

Muslim community has been lagging behind on all socio economic indicators. Somewhere the community leaders failed. State as an instrument of social development also failed. So as Muslim women we felt we need to take that initiative, we need to come forward, we need to lead the community, we need to lead the Muslim women so that an alternative voice, alternative perspective emerges from within the community. 

We are a movement so we are not registered. We are autonomous; we are not associated with any political party or organization. We have more than one lakh members across the country and the issues on which we work are education, health, livelihood, law reform and security. 

In the last 12 years our contribution has been on this whole debate around the issue of law reform. Our effort has been to bring about a comprehensive change in the MPL. To put it briefly, the Hindu community, which includes the Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists, is governed by the Hindu code bill or a set of 4 different laws. The Christian and the Parsis are also governed by their own codified personal law. But due to partition and other events that happened 70 years back and the kind of state patronage, which religious groups got from amongst the community, the Muslim family law got neglected. Which means we don’t have a codified law and which means all practices related to marriage and divorce are open. They are carried out by the information given out by the religious groups in the community. For so many decades these religious groups decided how the marriages will happen, what will be the age of marriage, divorce procedures etc. As a result we had rampant underage marriages because we don’t have a law, which defines marriage age for the community. We have rampant one-sided divorces as a result the marriage is terminated immediately. This was given legal validity and legal legitimacy by religious groups. So when a woman approaches a qazi and tells him that she is divorced like this, she is told that the divorce is done. And if she wants to go back to him or if the husband wants to stay with her, then she has to undergo the practice of halala. We have practice of muta marriages as well. Such practices are clearly patriarchal, anti women and clearly going against the values of human dignity. Because of the politics that we have had, these were allowed to perpetuate. 

Our organization took up this issue because we felt that if we don’t speak nobody else will. If we don’t speak, the state, the political parties, the men, the religious groups, nobody else will. So last 12 years our demand is that the MPL must be codified. What should be the age of marriage, what should be the divorce method, what about polygamy and inheritance rights, halala and muta – laws related to this must be made and it is the Parliament that should make this law. The Supreme Court passed a judgment against the practice of triple divorce. The legislation against it got passed in the Lok Sabha but got rejected in the Rajya Sabha twice. Now we have an Ordinance against it, which will lapse as we move towards an election. So the politics that has been played around by all political parties around the issue of Muslim women’s legal rights and the kind of exclusion that we have faced, is there for all to see. 

We have been told to work on the issues of health, employment, and education but not on the legal issues. They said don’t touch triple divorce, polygamy or for that matter any shariah issue. So what do we do, should we continue to perpetuate the injustice that is happening? We are Muslim women, but we are also citizens of this country. And as a citizen, if a Hindu women has legal protection, if she has a law, which says that, her husband cannot have another marriage and if he does then she can file a complaint under IPC 494, why cannot the Muslim women have that legal protection? 

There is a lot of talk about criminalization of divorce. So if a Muslim woman goes to the police station to say that she has been divorced on phone, the police says, what can we do? There is no law, which tells me to arrest this person. And now there is an Ordinance, which says that he can be arrested and can be put behind bars, we have a whole lot of people talking against it. So a Hindu woman has got the protection of a criminal law, which is ok but if a Muslim woman is asking for protection for herself and criminalizing certain activities, entire religious group are standing against her. And not just them but the entire feminist groups stood against her saying triple divorce should not be criminalized. This is the exclusion of the highest order. When will she be considered a human being, a citizen? 

So the work that we have been doing is to bring about a structural change within the community, by talking about codification of law, we have got the issue out in the open. We still don’t have a law but the triple divorce bill was discussed not once but twice in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and that itself is an achievement. The fact that this issue was discussed itself indicates that there was a structural change within the community. 

We also challenged the Haji Ali dargah Trust. They stopped women from going inside the sanctum sanctorum of the dargah. We started to negotiate with the management of the dargah trust but that did not heed. As a citizen of this country nobody can stop me from going there just because I am a woman, as simple as that. Why should I be denied the privilege of the Articles 14,15 etc. of the constitution?

We are trying to break that exclusion, we are the community, we are citizens of this country, and you cannot exclude us. We are part of this community and we are part of this nation and we are going to demand what rightfully belongs to us. 

We set up an organization called Darul Uloom-e-Niswan through which we trained 30 women to become qazis. Again a male bastion was challenged. Men in all religions do that; they appropriate religion for themselves as if it is their private property. Why should women not become qazis, why should they not solemnize marriages or undertake divorce proceedings? Nothing stops me, neither the constitution of the country nor my religion. Quran has multiple verses, which talk of equality of women and men. It talks of equality of all human beings. It is our own fears and our own hesitations that stop us. We prepared our own syllabus with no help from no alim or religious institution. We asked ourselves; how should a modern Muslim women work as a qazi? And we got our answers. 30 women enrolled for the course and it took us two years to carry out that programme. And now we have 15 women in the country who are trained qazis. It is the first of its kind, formal, organized institutional training for women qazis. 15 women are ready, now the community has to come forward. And just last week, a couple from Kolkata came forward where the women insisted that her nikaah would happen only through a woman qazi. These are structural changes and this is the democratization of the community; democratization of the institutions, democratization of the mindset of our community leaders. 

You cannot ignore a certain section for too long. You cannot repress a certain section for too long. You cannot also repress the diversity within the community. We are not one. We are divided on sect lines and on so many other parameters. Yes we are one at a certain level but we are also different. What a Muslim woman undergoes because she is a Muslim is very difficult to capture. What a woman undergoes when she has to work for 12 hours will be completely different from a woman who teaches in a university. We need to acknowledge the diversity within the women’s experiences; the lived reality of all must be taken into consideration. And that willingness to accept the diversity, to accept that women’s movement is not one big stream, but multiple streams and that there are multiple women who are fighting for a cause. We need to cede that space for women coming in with diverse experiences. And we also need to accept that we need to take on that challenge and that leadership. 

Our slogan is, our struggle, our leadership. If Muslim women do not have a law which gives them protection, and then who will ask for it? I will have to ask for it. If I am thrown out of my house, then I will have to make a demand for a better law. It is my problem, and it is going to be my leadership and I am going to take it forward to ensure that the community lives in peace and the women live in peace. So our struggle for a codified law is going continue. I don’t see when it will happen, because the politics around it has become so difficult. So we have all political parties wanting to take advantage, but for 70 years they did nothing about it. For the Haji Ali issue I remember meeting a Muslim cabinet minister and he refused to even talk to us. He said it is a matter of religion; we will not talk about it. We went to the minority commission and they said go and talk to the women’s commission, this is a women’s issue. We went to the women’s commission and they said talk to the minority commission because it is a matter of the minority community. So when the community does not listen to you, when the stakeholders within the community do not listen to you, when the government also does not listen to you, where do we go? 

We started to talk about human rights around the time of UNDHR and then around the 70s we started to talk of women’s rights by saying that lets not club women’s rights under the larger human rights framework. Now after many decades, dalit women are talking about their specific issues, look at the diversity that is gradually emerging. Trans women emerging, having issues simply because she is not heterosexual. How do we work together, understand each other?

At another level we have also challenged and reengaged with certain concepts. For many years we believed that to be a secular person is to be an atheist person. To be secular one has to give up religion. How does secularism work out in my life? I may be a believing Hindu or Muslim and how does that make me less secular? To be secular is to love and accept each and every kind of diversity that exists-religious, caste diversities etc. and just because I am a believing Hindu or Muslim women does not make me less secular. 

For me to be a Muslim is to be able to love each other. As simple as that. One of our slogans is where there is no justice, there is no islam. Jaha insaaf nahi hai vaha hum musalmaan hone ka daava kar hi nahi sakte.We have also challenged feminism. For me to be a feminist is not to be anti-man, anti-family or anti-child bearing. These are newly emerging concepts and experiences. How do we understand these concepts from newly emerging groups? How do I understand Islam? My understanding of Islam is very different from the Islam of conservative religious groups and the same of feminism and secularism. So diversity is also to conceptually see things and understand concepts differently.