Muslim Women's Quest for Justice marks an important milestone of a long journey. A journey that begun in 2005. Back then, in November, I set off to commence fieldwork for my master thesis in rural south Rajasthan, near Udaipur. There, I examined the ways women of the Meena community (re)negotiate patriarchal gender norms and women's identities within an unusual tribal women's court. Presided over by women, this court offered room for impoverished tribal women to articulate novel ideas of women's rights in the areas of marriage and the family within a women-friendly environment. During the six months of fieldwork, I learned that for many tribal women, this informal court was the only place where their concerns about domestic violence, marital rejection, polygamy, child custody, property, and maintenance were taken seriously. Then in contemporary India the sluggish and expensive state courts as well as the men-reserved community assemblies are generally more concerned with upholding patriarchal values than with the socio-economic needs of tribal women as mothers, daughters, and wives. My research evinces that such a female legal space could be particularly valuable for tribal women who are confronted with a predominantly men-dominated patriarchal legal context.

However, the possibilities for the realisation of gender justice on the ground that are opened up by informal legal institutions, such as this tribal women's court in Rajasthan, have been little acknowledged in the scholarship concerned with women's rights in contemporary India. Instead, legal, political, and feminist scholarship on issues of gender and law tends to posit non-state law and accompanying social forums as diametrically opposed to the modern state-legal system and to classical liberal-legal ideology in general. From such a perspective, informal institutions and laws – and especially Islam – are disparaged as illiberal obstacles to justice and citizenship rights and progress.

This book challenges such simplified modernist accounts that stress the dichotomy of non-state law versus state law. Instead, it highlights the recently renewed endeavours of Muslim women's rights activists to re-articulate gender justice and Muslim women's rights outside of the state legal system.