Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2018
In 2008 and 2009, the All India Muslim Women's Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB), Bazme Khawateen, and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) decisively destabilised patriarchal ideas of women's responsibilities and rights within marriage and the family with the release of their own versions of the Islamic marriage contract (nikahnama). Religious talk about marriage and the family pervades and informs Muslim women's sociolegal spaces in Lucknow. Moreover, public talk about conjugal rights and duties within Muslim marriage characterise, to a large extent, Muslim women's political interaction with hegemonic religious bodies such as the Islamic seminaries Darul Uloom Nadwatul and the Firangi Mahal (see Chapter 2). Within the last few years, Muslim women's rights activists from Lucknow have become an integral part of the politics that have surrounded the debates about the conjugal relationship in postcolonial India. ‘If we get married there should be a proper nikah and there should be proper rules about mehar, talaq, maintenance…everything should be there’, says Naish Hasan (BMMA). Shaista Amber (AIMWPLB) sounds a similar note: ‘Often people don't know what the Shariat and the Quran say on women's rights and duties within marriage. One of the goals of the All India Muslim Women's Law Board is to make people aware of these rights and to teach them that Muslim women in fact have rights - unlike in the opinion of the clergy’. Similar to attempts made by Muslim women lawyers, activists, and scholars in Egypt, Morocco, and Iran (Abu-Lughod 2010; Mir-Hosseini 2006), Hasan and Amber currently seek to navigate the complex terrain of sociolegal reform with the production of a tangible document - the marriage contract. Their ultimate goal is to infuse popular and formal discourse on marriage with ‘women-friendly’ messages on conjugality. The goal is to destabilise entrenched patterns of gender inequality within state and non-state law and in everyday life.
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