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5 - Between the home and the world: The many publics of Muslim law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2025

Sagnik Dutta
Affiliation:
Tilburg University and OP Jindal Global University
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Summary

I have been frustrated for five years now. I just want chutkara [riddance] from my husband. Nothing else.

When will this issue [triple talaq] be resolved? When will this issue be resolved? For how long will poor helpless women keep approaching us with issues of talaq? Will we keep running such adalat [women shariat adalats] forever? At some point, this must become the law. At some point, people like us [Muslim women] need to be involved in law-making.

On 22 August 2017, the majority judgments of the Supreme Court of India pronounced oral, unilateral divorce, known in popular parlance as triple talaq, un-Islamic and hence illegal. A few months following the Supreme Court judgment, the right-wing BJP government proposed a legislation to criminalise the practice of triple talaq. While the fight to declare triple talaq unconstitutional had united most Muslim women's groups, the move to criminalise the practice saw a wide chasm between multiple voices seeking to represent Muslim women and a Muslim community. Across the country, a public sphere of fierce debate about law reform was shaped by competing voices that sought to speak for the Muslim community. However, this debate did not fundamentally challenge the idea of a homogenous Muslim community whose identity rests on a state-defined conception of Muslim personal law based on a gendered division of labour in the heterosexual family. Against the backdrop of this fierce debate, women navigating the legal domain of the women's shariat adalat in Mumbai – a space which is also a part of the BMMA's struggle for gender justice in community spaces – continually challenged the narrative of a homogeneous Muslim community founded on a Muslim family. The logic of the shariat adalat was based on a recognition of the violence and fragility of the family and the fluidity of gendered roles in the family. It provided women with a space of comfort where they could openly talk about the violence of the family and fight for a divorce at points of crisis in the heterosexual family. In that sense, the alternative dispute resolution forums were semi-public spaces situated in between the public sphere of debate on law reform and the home. These spaces provided a supportive environment where women could talk about the violence at home.

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In the Shadow of Minority Rights
Decolonising Gender, Liberalism and the Politics of Difference
, pp. 131 - 159
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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