In a bustling neighbourhood in a bylane off the Western Express Highway in Mumbai, a small room houses the women's sharia adalat (alternative dispute resolution forum) of the BMMA. The women's sharia court, as it is popularly known, is presided over only by activists of the BMMA who have been trained as qazi who resolve marital disputes. In the adjudication of cases, the qazi heard both the sides when a couple approached the court for resolving a matrimonial dispute. She often advised both men and women to demonstrate compassion (raham) in their everyday interactions even at the point of breakdown of a marriage. Suraiya Shaikh, a female qazi, conducted training sessions on Muslim family law on marriage, divorce and maintenance for women of the neighbourhood. In her training sessions, she often emphasised the spiritual equality of men and women and how they were equally obligated to lead a life of piety. Shaikh would invoke this notion of equality to critique social and legal inequality between men and women.

In this chapter, I analyse the concept of gender equality as it is constituted by activists and adjudicators of the BMMA. In doing so, I delineate how notions of ethics are brought to bear on the concept of gender equality. While the previous chapter showed how the right to religious freedom is constituted in ethical ways using the language of duty by activists while they navigate the framework of minority rights and Muslim family law, this chapter focuses on the concept of gender equality. In debates on multiculturalism, gender equality has been a bone of contention. Liberal feminists have often been preoccupied with the question of balancing gender equality with the cultural and religious rights of minority communities. Theorists working within a liberal multiculturalist paradigm dwell upon the state regulation of minority cultural, ethnic and religious practices for the attainment of normative goods such as freedom, autonomy and gender equality. There is, on the one hand, Okin's rather crude characterisation of cultures that are ‘religious ones and those that look to the past – to ancient texts of revered traditions’ – as discriminating against women. Okin's work suffers from a careless characterisation of cultures and religions.