Introduction: women's ‘religious non-conformism’ in India

In 2003, Asra Nomani, resident of West Virginia and descendant of the Indian Islamic liberal scholar Shibli Nu‘mani, wrote a widely reported charter entitled the ‘Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Mosque’. Written in honour of Hagar, the ancestral Arab matriarch, it argued that mosques should not be reserved for men alone, but that women hold equal claim to worship in mosques and to lead congregational prayers.Footnote ² Two years later in 2005, Nomani helped to organize what would become perhaps the defining moment of global exposure for Islamic feminismFootnote ³, when the African American feminist scholar Amina Wadud led the Friday congregational prayers and sermon before a mixed-gender congregation in a mosque in New York.Footnote ⁴ Less well known is that, following the event, Asra Nomani's journalistic and activist attentions turned to the small town of Pudukkottai in southernmost Tamil Nadu. Here a local women's rights activist, Da'ud Sharifa Khanam, had recently kick-started a campaign to establish what she described as the ‘world's first women-only mosque’.Footnote ⁵ While a somewhat hyperbolic claim, her campaign to found a mosque whose prayer-leaders, trustees, and guardians would all be female was a statement of radical departure from the norms of South Asian mosque praxis, in which men alone are typically privileged with such roles.

This single campaign for a women's mosque sat within a wider patchwork of movements emerging across India that sought to question or renovate existing structures of everyday Islamic practice, and to appoint women into positions of religious leadership usually reserved for men. Around the same time, in cities including Mumbai, Lucknow, and Jaipur, Muslim women's associations were inaugurating new mosques to allow women's congregational prayer, running women's ‘shari‘ah ‘adalats’ (shari‘ah councils) to offer gender-just advice on Islamic laws, permitting women to officiate at Muslim marriages, and setting up Muslim mahila mandals (women's committees) to empower women within family and local environments. In the 15 years since, a generation of female Muslim activists and leaders of Muslim women's associations have continued to initiate comparable remodellings of Islamic praxis (a term that I take to refer to the conventions, observances, and leadership structures adhered to in normative religious life).Footnote ⁶ They have promoted a range of women's prayer congregations, devotional acts, and ‘sisterhoods’ (biradarian) of Muslim women, and have organized innovative acts of women's religious observance, leadership, and collective assembly.

These activists speak boldly of ‘asserting women's existence in the sphere of worship’; they strive to claim (or, as they see it, ‘reclaim’) women's admission both to Islam's major offices of authority, such as the positions of imam (prayer leader) or qazi (religious judge), and to its religious sites, such as mosques and dargahs (shrines).Footnote ⁷ They portray themselves as, to quote one activist, ‘acting upon our religion (apne din pe ‘amal kar-rahe hain)’, translating their understanding of Islam into practice with a directness unlike that of previous generations of activists.

Unsurprisingly, these multiple endeavours have divided community opinion. Sympathetic journalists have characterized them as indicative of a wave of women's ‘religious non-conformism’ that might ‘unshackle’ women from traditional constraints.Footnote ⁸ Conversely, these new models of religious action have been much maligned by many among the ‘ulama, Islam's amorphous class of clerics, who see them as bid‘ah (innovations) in Islamic norms that could create disorder (fitna) in Muslim society. In 2008, one maulvi memorably dismissed these ruptures of established norms as ‘Huma ki ghalatian ka netijah (the result of Eve's mistakes)’,Footnote ⁹ while detractors continue to refer to these religious experiments as ‘gimmicks’ or ‘arranged dramas’ that distract from the community's real problems.Footnote ¹⁰

These overhauls of religious observance seem all the bolder since practices of ‘ibadat (Islamic worship) have often been somewhat conservative in South Asia compared to many other Muslim societies.Footnote ¹¹ This may owe to the long-standing influence in the subcontinent of reformist movements such as the Deobandis, Barelwis, and Ahl-i-Hadith that emphasize rigid stipulations of religious observance. Alternatively, it may reflect what one activist described as a ‘defensive mentality’ among Muslims in contemporary India, a reaction to the community's perceived socio-political besiegement that leads community elders and clerics to police religious strictures and demand group subservience, especially by women, to restrictive everyday protocols.Footnote ¹² Either way, the women who have advocated these remodellings of religion have done so in often-hostile local environments that are regulated according to male-led religious hierarchies.

Female-led innovations in religious conventions comparable to those in contemporary India have been documented elsewhere in the world. Assumptions of traditionally male Islamic leadership roles and forms of worship by Muslim women have occurred in many regions, especially in the last two decades, with women increasingly visible as prayer-leaders, preachers, and religious jurists and judges.Footnote ¹³ However, the most radical examples have often appeared in a spectrum of Western nations and a finite number of notably cosmopolitan societies like Malaysia and South Africa.Footnote ¹⁴ Studies have therefore often situated these innovations in fluid cultural environments marked by histories of migration, cultural hybridity, and rapid social change.Footnote ¹⁵ These studies thus depict environments that feel very different from the conservative everyday Islamic structures at work in much of South Asia, including in the poor urban locales where some of the most audacious examples of women's religious innovation discussed in this article have taken root.

Moreover, existing scholarship on Muslim women's religious observance in contemporary South Asia has generally traced a rather different trajectory from that documented here. Studies have shown that, especially within the last two decades, the subcontinent has been witness to various tabligh and da‘wa’ (proselytization) campaigns that impart Islamic piety and knowledge to Muslim women. As proven by works on, among others, women's madrasas in North India, the Al-Huda and Jama‘at-i-Da‘wa’ women's groups in Pakistan, and women's Qur'anic study circles in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Muslim women's piety movements have grown in force and number across South Asia.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, most of these studies are influenced, directly or indirectly, by the late Saba Mahmood's path-breaking work on women's study circles in the mosques of Cairo, and her framework of women's self-fashioning of their so-called ‘pious subjecthood’ through the cultivation of personal religious commitment and critical engagement with religion.Footnote ¹⁷ These South Asian women, therefore, are deemed to cultivate their own religious autonomy and agency by immersing themselves in religious knowledge and lifestyles, and, like the ‘pious subjects’ or ‘docile agents’ of Mahmood's study, they do so in a way that affirms their ultimate conformity with religious teachings and conventions that may, ultimately, be socially conservative and male dominated.Footnote ¹⁸ Emphasizing women's wilful acceptance of existing Islamic norms, this framework contributes relatively little to understanding the more transgressive remodellings of religion discussed in this article which sometimes, as expressed by the activist quoted at the beginning of this article, take ‘pleasure’ in deliberately ‘breaking’ existing patriarchal realities.

This article seeks to shed light on two interrelated developments in contemporary India: first, the innovative remodelling of Islamic conventions by Muslim women and, second, the investment of huge energy by a spectrum of female Muslim women's activists and associations in pioneering these revisions. Islamic religious non-conformism and Muslim women's activism, I suggest, have found a strategic alignment in India that is more prominent than for most women's rights movements elsewhere in the Islamic world. I argue that, for a combination of reasons, the distinctive variant of ‘secularism’ that has taken shape in Indian society and politics has provided a particularly fertile environment for the production of this brand of religious activism. India's ‘secular’ polity, by setting a context of supposed state non-intervention in religious laws and practices, and securing rights to freedom of religion, provides Muslim women with the discursive and operational space to make their own claims to religious authority and action. Simultaneously, I argue, this same polity has persistently framed Muslim women as subjects of their religion, bound by community norms as well as state laws. In doing this, it has compelled activists to defend the equality and rights of women via campaigns of religious, as well as socio-economic, intervention. The manifold Muslim women's associations described in this article, I show, have all instrumentalized religious practices in different ways, but all of their initiatives are attempts to co-opt the lived, practical realities of religion as the means by which they might pursue women's social empowerment.

This article is an attempt to tell the stories of a spectrum of female Muslim activists from various parts of India, including Lucknow, Mumbai, Jaipur, and Tamil Nadu, exploring the ways in which they have represented and furthered their attempt to create distinctive female religious spaces and positions of leadership within Islam. The article's next section posits a framework for understanding women's remodelling of religious practice in India, unravelling the interactions between religious non-conformism, women's rights activism, and Indian secularism. The subsequent sections focus consecutively upon a series of modern campaigns around India that have sought to open up three distinctively male religious ‘spaces’ to women: the mosque, the shari‘ah council, and the Sufi shrine.

Muslim women's activism and religious non-conformism in India: explaining a convergence

India has long been host to a range of Muslim women's associations, which together embody a distinctive brand of ‘minority feminism’.Footnote ¹⁹ Since independence, and especially in more recent decades, a range of separate but loosely interrelated such groups have come into being, among them the Muslim Satyashodhak Samaj (founded in 1970); Awaaz-e-Niswaan (1987); the Women's Research and Action Group (1993) and the Muslim Women's Rights Network (1999), both of Mumbai; and the Muslim Women's Forum of Delhi (2000).Footnote ²⁰ Many of these groups emerged during or after the late 1980s, when the perceived attempts by both the Hindu right and arch-secularists to speak for Muslim women's interests during the Shah Bano affair (1985–1986) compelled some Muslim women to develop community-specific campaigns that were identifiably distinct from mainstream, national women's organizations.Footnote ²¹

These Muslim women's associations operate at a mixture of local, state, and national levels, and engage in a myriad of activities in pursuance of their aims, ranging from legislative lobbying and public awareness campaigns to litigation and legal aid. They have also sought a careful balance in their relationship with other civil society movements and causes. On the one hand, they adopt a multidimensional approach, aligning themselves accordingly with the wider agendas of national women's associations (for example, pushing for women's educational and employment rights, and against domestic mistreatment and social discrimination).Footnote ²² Simultaneously, however, these associations have been formed to address difficulties that are specific to the experiences of Muslim women. As is often argued, the particular public and political discourse surrounding Muslim minority rights in India, and the ensuing tendency to frame Muslim women as distinct, even ‘unequal’, from other female citizens, has meant that the state has often treated Muslim women as a somewhat separate category from other women in social and legal affairs.Footnote ²³ In turn, the difficulties faced by Muslim women are often different from those of other female citizens.Footnote ²⁴ The distinctive nature of the Indian Muslim woman's predicament has led Muslim women's associations, while sharing some objectives with cross-confessional women's groups, to work simultaneously within the parameters of religious community. As such, most of these Muslim women's rights groups amalgamate religious and secular reasoning in pursuance of their goals, justifying their campaigns for women's justice and equality via the intersecting principles of the Indian constitution, human rights, and liberal readings of Islamic teachings.

However, despite the heterogeneous character of these many Muslim women's associations, there has been a tangible shift in how some of the most recent among them have instrumentalized matters of religion. The more prominent Muslim women's groups of the 1990s and early 2000s, including those named above, rarely addressed questions of Islamic religious conduct. Instead, they focused (and still do) on Muslim women's social and legal rights, and did so through a range of initiatives: for instance, by advocating for legislative reforms to personal laws, leading public awareness campaigns, facilitating women's access to the judicial system, and offering legal guidance and counselling to women.Footnote ²⁵ These groups were thus generally ‘tolerant’ rather than ‘celebratory’ of religion, only rarely engaging specifically in confessional matters such as the reformulation of religious authority or practices of worship.Footnote ²⁶

Subsequently, in the last 15 years, a clear second generation of Muslim women's organizations has emerged that combine campaigns for women's socio-economic and legal rights with simultaneous demands for their rights within everyday religious praxis. Organizations such as the Muslim Women's Jama‘at of Tamil Nadu (founded in 2004), the All India Women's Personal Law Board of Lucknow (founded in 2005), and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Muslim Women's Movement of India) (founded in 2007) mark a tangible shift in agenda and strategy by Muslim women's activists.Footnote ²⁷ Compared to their antecedents, these organizations have engaged in a more direct challenge to the regulations of everyday religious life.

Significantly, this particular convergence of Muslim women's activism and religious non-conformism differs not just from its antecedents in India, but from women's rights movements and organizations in many other parts of the Muslim world. Women's associations in Muslim-majority states have generally focused on a range of social, economic, and legal causes analogous to those being pursued Muslim women's associations in India: the details vary by country, but generally include campaigns to influence the reform of family laws (for instance, laws on polygamy, divorce, or inheritance rights), to protect women from social abuses (for example, forced marriage, marital mistreatment, or domestic violence), or to advance women's access to education and employment.Footnote ²⁸ In light of their core focus upon women's socio-economic, legal, and political rights, these associations have engaged points of religious praxis only marginally. They have generally paid scant attention to issues such as women's entry into mosques or prayer-leadership, which might seem like peripheral, unnecessarily divisive, and strategically unwise diversions from their broader objectives.Footnote ²⁹

That Muslim women's activists in India have engaged so directly with attempts to amend religious norms and behaviours thus warrants investigation on its own terms. These activists sometimes justify their focus on such matters on the basis that Muslim women face multiple challenges, and thus those seeking to promote their rights need to adopt a multipolar approach. As one leading activist argues, Muslim women in India are ‘triply disadvantaged’: by their gender, by patriarchal understandings of religion, and by their status within an often marginalized and stigmatized minority community.Footnote ³⁰ Their problems thus derive from religious and cultural as well as socio-economic and legal roots, meaning that activists have been compelled to address all of these many sources of women's disempowerment alongside each other.

Yet, I suggest in this article that the reasons why female activists in contemporary India have taken up matters of religious praxis with such determination rest within India's particular legal-constitutional framework for handling religious questions, namely, its own version of ‘secularism’. As many analysts have argued, India has developed a ‘distinctively Indian’, ‘context specific’, and perpetually negotiable variant of secularism by which the state, somewhat contradictorily, pledges to refrain from interfering in the laws and practices of religious communities, while simultaneously giving citizens constitutional protection from forms of inequality and discrimination that arise from religious customs.Footnote ³¹ India's variant of secularism, for several reasons, has provided a supportive milieu for the rise of this brand of confessionally engaged women's activism.

One factor that shapes Muslim women's activism in India—contestable but often alluded to by activists—is that the state's pledged non-intervention in religious beliefs and practices permits women's groups more scope and space to engage autonomously with questions of religion than has been available to them in many Middle Eastern or Asian states. In many Muslim-majority nations, religious institutions are subjected to state supervision or regulation of various kinds. Some regimes, for instance, regulate institutions such as mosques, madrasas (religious schools), or waqfs (Muslim endowments), or insist upon the licensing of imams or religious teachers.Footnote ³² Most Muslim nations have also legislated upon or even fully codified Islamic family laws.Footnote ³³ In these contexts, in which the state has taken on a proactive role in the management of religion, the ability of activists to challenge existing religious norms has been somewhat restricted; their challenges to religious structures are at risk of being interpreted as acts of societal or political disturbance.Footnote ³⁴ By contrast, the assumption of what Rajeev Bhargava refers to as the state's ‘principled distance’ from religion, which is embedded in India's variant of secularism, has left minority religious institutions comparatively free from official involvement.Footnote ³⁵ India has no formally recognized Islamic clerical body or council equivalent to those that exist in many Muslim states, while Islamic religious schools and the community bodies governing mosques, shrines, and other institutions operate largely unfettered by state regulations. This unregulated religious framework, within which there is no ‘official’ Islamic voice or hierarchy to represent the community, permits more scope for activists and other practitioners to tinker with conventional Islamic conduct according to their own inclinations.

However, while India's unique variant of secularism can thereby empower women's groups to speak on matters of religion, it can simultaneously facilitate women's disempowerment at the hands of structures of religious community. India's secular framework, affirming that religious minority communities should be permitted to live according to their own laws and values, has meant that Muslim community structures have remained largely free from state involvement. In turn, this has given community leaderships and institutions considerable sway over the everyday regulation of Muslim community affairs.Footnote ³⁶ India's Muslim personal law system, by which Muslims are subject to a separate and distinct body of religious family laws, is perhaps the key example. By comparison with most Muslim-majority nations, Muslim family laws in India have been subject to very little codification and are adjudicated in practice by a range of both state- and non-state legal forums, including both the civil and family courts, and a range of informal, largely autonomous religious and community bodies such as mosque jama‘ats (committees), panchayats (local community councils), and dar-al-qazas (non-judicial Islamic ‘courts’).Footnote ³⁷ This complex, pluralized legal framework gives religious leaders and community bodies a level of social and legal command that has major implications for women. As one activist puts it, the Muslim personal law system creates local realities in which women are subjected to the whims of male maulvis and so-called ‘fatwa-happy’ institutions, and live under perpetual threat of marital abuses like immediate unilateral divorce (talaq-i-bid‘ah), the withholding of spousal maintenance, or involuntary subjection to polygamous marriage.Footnote ³⁸

India's legal-constitutional framework for handling the laws and institutions of the Muslim minority is thus very different from the approach of most Muslim-majority states, where such religious questions have been subject to various kinds of regulation by official or semi-official bodies. In turn, these different frameworks have determined the strategies followed by women's activists in these different centres. In most Muslim majority-states, where the state has had a greater hand in regulating religious laws and institutions, women's rights movements have often attempted to incur state involvement to achieve their objectives, by lobbying parliamentarians, promoting women's access to legal services, or creating political will through public awareness campaigns.Footnote ³⁹ In India, however, the strategy followed by Muslim women's activists is somewhat different. While they too actively lobby politicians and engage the courts to work towards their goals, they are also operating in a situation in which the state's mandate is limited. India's activists thus ‘cannot work through the legislature’ alone to obtain changes to family laws or other woman-friendly reforms, as perhaps they could within more centrally regulated legal-political frameworks.Footnote ⁴⁰ Instead, they can only effect meaningful transformations if they combine official approaches with counterpart initiatives that concentrate on establishing changes in what respondents called ‘mindsets’ or ‘mentalities’ at the community level.Footnote ⁴¹ This has laid the basis for a less state-oriented, more ground-level, and informal strategy for India's Muslim women's activists, which seeks to establish a consciousness of women's equality not simply in written law or official arenas, but within community structures.Footnote ⁴²

This helps to explain why Muslim women's activists in India have engaged so directly with religious practices. Conscious of the limits of official and state-centred mechanisms to further Muslim women's needs, a new generation of activists has increasingly pursued a non-state strategy to effect grassroots change.Footnote ⁴³ They have aspired to renovate informal and community realities in order to emancipate individual women—socially, emotionally, or mentally—within their everyday lives, and they have instrumentalized religious piety (diyanat) to do so. As expressed by Nishaat Husain, the activist (and ‘qazi’) quoted at the beginning of this article, women need to recover religion as the source of their own personal ‘power’ and agency (shakti, quwwat), rather than accepting it as a source of their oppression.Footnote ⁴⁴

Nevertheless, there are distinctions in how the activists discussed in this article have instrumentalized religious praxis to deliver this ‘power’ to Muslim women. Sometimes, women's activists assign a chiefly inspirational role to religion, claiming that the recovery of women's ability to worship or to engage Islamic teachings can provide individual women with the courage to assert their social and legal rights in all areas of life. In other cases, these activists have conceived their renovations of Islamic practices as themselves transformative, since these ruptures directly undermine the norms that underpin social patriarchy. Thus, while the several campaigns described below differ among themselves in their manner of remodelling religion and their attitudes towards existing religious conventions, all share a comparable emphasis upon the renovation of Islamic conduct as the basis for a recovery of women's spiritual and social empowerment.

Women claiming the mosque

In the last 15 years, journalists have sometimes referred to a ‘women's mosque movement’ (‘auraton ki masaajid ki tehrik) in India.Footnote ⁴⁵ While in reality there has not been a singular movement such as this, there have been several individual campaigns to open up the religious life of the mosque to greater female participation. These have included campaigns by women to found mosques, and for the foundation of mosques whose main congregational spaces are accessible to women, or which are reserved for female worshippers, or which are staffed by female imams. Recently, there have also been major attempts to push the boundaries of women's prayer practices.

Notwithstanding certain strictures within the classical Islamic law schools on women's access to mosque-based worship, there are long-term historical precedents in Islamic thought for women attending mosques and acting as congregational prayer-leaders.Footnote ⁴⁶ Likewise, in much of the contemporary Islamic world, the prayer spaces of mosques are accessible to female worshippers. Female prayer-leaders (imamahs) have been trained and appointed to mosques in many Muslim societies, both through official government support or grassroots demand,Footnote ⁴⁷ while there are even women-only mosques in some countries.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, for the reasons previously discussed, women's access to the life of the mosque in South Asia remains generally restrictive in comparison. Many mosques in South Asia remain male-only spaces or, in other cases, only admit female worshippers to peripheral sections such as side-rooms, cellars, or balconies.Footnote ⁴⁹ Female-led public or mosque-based congregational prayers, while not unknown, remain somewhat exceptional in India.Footnote ⁵⁰ South Asian fatwas on prayer frequently emphasize that men should pray in congregation, while women may simply pray at home, and some prominent fatwas forbid women from leading prayers in any context.Footnote ⁵¹

Recent years, however, have seen several prominent efforts at transforming these regulatory norms of mosque-based worship. A striking, early effort to allow women access to the life of the mosque was led by Shaista Amber, the energetic founder of the All India Muslim Women's Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB), an organization that advocates reforms to Muslim personal laws and other community causes.Footnote ⁵² Renowned as a committed Marxist before becoming a Muslim women's rights activist, and known as ‘Godmother’ by some admirers, Amber has built a career that combines interventions in national media and legislative debates on women's rights, especially on Muslim personal law reform, with ground-level social work among women in her neighbourhood of southern Lucknow. Yet, her formation of the AIMWPLB in 2005 was in fact foreshadowed by an earlier, more locally focused effort to establish a mosque. In a trope common to India's feminist activists, Amber links the mosque campaign to her own life-story.Footnote ⁵³ She recalls not being able to accompany her young son to her neighbourhood mosque and how this ignited her desire to build a mosque herself; she further recalls that, living near a major hospital, she often met women who desperately wanted to pray for ill relatives but had nowhere to go.Footnote ⁵⁴ Initially she proposed a women-only mosque, though this later developed into proposals for a mixed-congregation mosque with allotted spaces for women. She invested her personal wealth (and sold jewellery) to secure the plot of land. Equally crucial to her was the moral support she received from the scholar she refers to as ‘my marja‘ my shaikh’, the renowned principal of the Nadva't ul-‘Ulama seminary, Abul Hasan ‘Ali Nadvi, who offered support to her campaign and laid the foundation stone in 1999.Footnote ⁵⁵

Ultimately, the ‘Anbar Masjid (often misnamed the ‘Amber Masjid’ by her detractors, perhaps to imply her alleged self-importance, although the actual name refers to the mosque's pearl-grey tint) opened to worshippers in around 2004. Mixed-gender congregational prayers are led in the mosque by a male imam, and while women conduct prayers behind the male congregation, they do so in the same congregational space. Moreover, an additional, upstairs area in the mosque is reserved for women alone, and Amber and other women sometimes lead female-only salat prayers in the mosque. She claims that the number of women travelling to the mosque to join in prayers is increasing year by year.

To legitimize shared spaces of worship, Amber looks to women in Islamic history. She invokes Hazrat Bibi Hafsa, one of the Prophet's wives, who acted as imam and led prayers for female congregations. Historically, she notes, women in India have founded mosques: for instance, Malika Jahan Begum, wife of Awadh's former king Muhammad ‘Ali Shah, completed the jama’ masjid in Amber's hometown of Lucknow following his death.Footnote ⁵⁶ Amber also argues that she is recovering the Prophet's original ethos of the mosque, when it was not, as now, a place for reinforcing male custody of worship, but an open institution of social provision serving the whole community. Reclaiming this broad vision of the mosque as a place of community service, she notes that the ‘Anbar Masjid provides many women who only rarely leave their homes with a ‘place to go’, a space to ‘gather, discuss, share their problems’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Recovering the mosque's original status as an institution of social compassion, her mosque contains a counselling centre (or shari‘ah ‘adalat—see below) for women, and a shelter and refuge to provide for the poor of any community. Moreover, the mosque maintains permanent aspirations to be at the vanguard of innovation: recently, it has become India's first mosque to run entirely on solar power.

An equally path-breaking campaign has been a long-term campaign for a women-only mosque in South India, serviced by an entirely female staff as imam, mu‘ezzin, and trustees. This campaign has been championed by Da'ud Sharifa Khanam, an activist who leads a 3,000-strong NGO called the Muslim Women's Jama‘at (also known as Steps) which provides counselling and other aid to marginalized women in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu. Like Amber, Sharifa carries a well-rehearsed autobiography which she links to her mosque movement. As she tells it, she remains unmarried: the youngest of ten children, her parents were unable to afford the customary dowry.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sharifa tells how she was able to obtain local support in the district of Pudukkottai to begin a fundraising campaign to establish a women-only mosque. The mosque has a plot of land allotted to it by a generous local benefactor but, predictably, its construction remains as yet unfulfilled. It has come up against numerous challenges, including local bureaucracy and opposition from the Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam, the Tamil Islamist organization connected with many of the province's mosques. Nevertheless, the campaign continues. As Sharifa has put it, ‘all I want is my mosque to become the nerve centre of a vibrant, Islamic, feminist and democratic culture’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Da'ud Sharifa's mosque movement is a clear attempt to challenge the internal structures of hierarchy within Muslim communities. Every mosque in Tamil Nadu, she explains, is run by a jama‘at: a council of community elders, almost always exclusively male, that is locally authoritative and issues directives on all kinds of intra-community affairs including marriage, divorce, dowry, custody, and domestic abuse. The ‘mosque-jama‘at axis’, Sharifa argues, represents a ‘power centre’, an undeclared ‘kangaroo court’ that makes decisions dictating women's lives in male-only spaces, without soliciting any participation from the women affected.Footnote ⁶⁰ This power held by male jama‘ats, Sharifa explains, compelled her to begin setting up an all-female equivalent. In 2004, she established the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women's Jama‘at, a community body that she proudly calls the world's first women's jama‘at, and a conscious counterweight to the power of the mainstream mosque bodies. The organization, which is now said to have branches in almost half of Tamil Nadu's districts, invites any woman who has not been given justice by her local mosque committee to submit an account of her grievances, upon which the Jama‘at approaches the mosque in question to demand redress.Footnote ⁶¹ But, she argues, for the Women's Jama‘at to have the same authority as a male equivalent, it needs a comparable appearance, and ‘since a jama‘at is attached to a mosque, we have to build our own mosque’.Footnote ⁶²

There are of course slightly different accents to the arguments used by Amber and Sharifa. Amber is clear that she herself was only empowered to found the AIMWPLB and begin her quest for legal reforms after establishing her mosque: ‘it is that mosque where Allah granted me the opportunity to take the most important decision of my life, to set up the All India Women's Personal Law Board’.Footnote ⁶³ She thus reasons that access to a mosque may give women confidence and self-worth that can inspire them in other facets of their lives, as it did for her. For Sharifa, there is a greater emphasis on the desired mosque as directly overhauling the everyday hierarchies of religion and a structural challenge to male jama‘ats. Nevertheless, there is an intuitive connection between these two campaigns in their desire to approach social-legal questions through community-level religious observance. Both movements’ leaders identify the local mosque, rather than the court or bureaucracy, as the most effective point of approach for empowering women, and both believe that creating a new mosque may ultimately exercise real change in India's community structures. Both, in other words, are calculating that questions relating to Muslim women's social and religious rights are in various ways interconnected and must be addressed together.

These two examples have paved the way for some even more audacious moves by female activists to assert women's agency to worship in mosques or lead prayers in recent years. An especially striking recent intervention came in the otherwise anonymous village of Cherukode in Kerala's Mallapuram district in January 2018. Here, K. Jameetha ‘Teacher’, an administrator within a local religious organization known as the Khuran Sunnath Society, ‘followed the footsteps of Amina Wadud and Asra Nomani’ and purportedly became India's first woman to lead the juma‘h prayer and sermon before a mixed-gender congregation of approximately 80 worshippers.Footnote ⁶⁴ While the venue for the event was an office rather than a mosque, the notion of a woman leading even men in prayer made this perhaps the most controversial of the acts described here, and it led to scorn and threats of vigilantism from conservative opponents.Footnote ⁶⁵

Like the earlier mosque movements discussed above, Jameetha's remodelling of confessional practice can be interpreted as a step towards a broader programme of structural religious reform. The organization at the heart of the event, the Khuran Sunnath Society, had been founded to disseminate the teachings and work of the Islamic scholar Chekanoor Maulavi, a known ‘Qur'anist’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Like the ‘Qur'anist’ and anti-hadith reformist movements that have long been influential in countries like Malaysia, Pakistan, and the United States (but rather less so in India where conservative Hanafi interpretations remain dominant), the Khuran Sunnath has advocated a return to the Qur'an alone as the basis for developing ethically conscious norms of social conduct.Footnote ⁶⁷ The organization has also encouraged the rejection of the hadith, and the later tradition of fiqh (jurisprudence), as a means of unlocking Islam's progressive instincts. Like Islamic feminists more widely, the Khuran Sunnath has considered a return to the Qur'an as a means of enhancing women's rights both in religious practices such as prayer leadership and mosque attendance, but also in matters of Islamic family laws.Footnote ⁶⁸ To put this another way, Jameetha's visible renovation of prayer conventions carried the subtext of rejecting existing conventions of fiqh, thereby initiating greater equality and justice for women in all areas of Muslim social relations.

Women claiming the court

If the mosque represents one normatively ‘male’ religious space that reinforces patriarchal authority, then the shari‘ah court (shari‘ah ‘adalat, dar-al-qaza) represents another. India's variegated institutional structure for the handling of personal laws ensures that such Islamic religious courts, which offer shari‘ah-based decisions on personal and family affairs such as marriages and divorces, exist in numbers in India.Footnote ⁶⁹ While holding no official legal jurisdiction, they are highly influential at a non-state level, especially as a result of the increasing sway of so-called ‘alternative dispute resolution’ (ADR) mechanisms since the 1990s.Footnote ⁷⁰ According to the understandings perpetuated by the qazis (Islamic judges) who preside in these courts, most of whom follow largely conservative Hanafi teachings, a qazi has to be male. This is despite the fact that it is women who are often compelled to approach these shari‘ah courts. The disparities in the matrimonial rights granted to Muslim men and women in India under Islamic family law (for instance, wives need to secure the intervention of a male qazi in order to initiate a marital separation, while a husband can do so unilaterally), together with a frequent lack of kinship or community support for women in fractious family situations, mean that most of those who seek out a qazi for advice, representation, or arbitration tend to be women.Footnote ⁷¹

It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that when Muslim women's activists address the everyday workings of religion, they have sometimes prioritized reconsidering and appropriating the office of the Islamic qazi (religious judge). From around 2004–2005, several Muslim women's organizations, including the AIMWPLB and the Muslim Women's Jama‘at, as discussed above, were running their own shari‘ah ‘adalats, chiefly as counterweights to Lucknow's madrasa-based shari‘ah courts and Tamil Nadu's mosque brotherhoods respectively. These forums were non-official counselling, legal aid, and arbitration organizations, though ones that often justified their advice on ‘Islamic’ grounds of reasoning.

The same years also saw, amid much publicity, women taking up another central function of the qazi: that of marriage registrar. In Lucknow in 2008, Syeda Hameed, a planning commissioner who worked for the Uttar Pradesh state government, accepted an invitation to act as qazi to officiate the marriage of a local women's rights activist, Na'ish Hasan. Additionally, Hasan's nikah was, contrary to tradition, witnessed by four women (some of whom comprised the circle who were currently establishing the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, BMMA). Hameed herself worked explicitly to defend a woman's ability to assume such a customarily male position. ‘During the days of pristine Islam,’ she argues, ‘there must have been women qazis, but there is no historical record [either] to prove or disprove their existence.’ Their presence, however, can be inferred from the ‘inexorable fact’ that the arrival of Islam brought ‘women's empowerment in … marriage, property, business and matters of religion’.Footnote ⁷² Hasan, along with the marriage's various officiates and much of the press, were unanimous in declaring the event to be one with ‘no precedent … in recent Muslim history’, one that ‘smashed a glass ceiling’ in affirming women's rights to take charge of their own marital choices, contracts, and ceremonies.Footnote ⁷³

Perhaps taking a lead from this first adoption of the status of qazi, the BMMA ultimately initiated the creation of a more systematic, self-proclaimed all-India ‘movement’ to establish women's shari‘ah ‘adalats across India.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 2013, it set up its first four ‘women's courts’: in Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Dindigul (Tamil Nadu). Today, the organization oversees a number of these shari‘ah ‘adalats, where female qazis meet with local women (and their family members when appropriate) in designated offices and handle a range of predominantly matrimonial and family issues that are causing them suffering. They hear cases relating to abuses enacted by husbands, including domestic violence, cruelty, unilateral triple-talaq divorce, or failure to provide adequate spousal maintenance, as well as grievances relating to in-laws. The qazis advise women on both official/state-focused means and unofficial/shari‘ah-based mechanisms to address their problems. In practice, they act both as arbitrators, facilitating either marital separations or reconciliations between estranged partners, and as interlocutors, referring women to a variety of external bodies, including the police, family courts, and sympathetic community forums that might offer legal or personal assistance. The largest women's shari‘ah courts, like those in Mumbai and Jaipur, claim to receive around 200 cases each per year; together, the BMMA's shari‘ah ‘adalat network has handled thousands of cases since its foundation.

To support the movement, the BMMA has appointed some 20 female graduates as ‘qazis’ who now work in many Indian states. All have been trained through the Dar-ul-‘Uloom-i-Niswan, a programme set up by the BMMA that takes place over a number of sessions and gives its graduates a qualification in Islamic qazi‘at (judgeship).Footnote ⁷⁵ Predictably, male ‘ulama have often challenged the ability of these women to make valid decisions according to Islamic law. According to Khatun Shaikh, Mumbai's indomitable head female qazi, local mullahs treated the female qazis with disdain once they began their work, instructing that they should ‘sit at home and manage the house’ or reminding them that ‘your husband is your God’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Nevertheless, like the women involved in the mosque movements discussed above, these activists have sometimes received cautious acceptance from some male clerics, and in reality these all-female courts sometimes cooperate with some of the more sympathetic male scholars in their own cities to address the problems faced by women.Footnote ⁷⁷

The appointment of female qazis has not been without controversy even among Muslim women's activists, some of whom have distanced themselves from what they perceive as a controversial and provocative departure from the tradition of male-only religious judges.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, justifying their occupation of a conventionally male position of authority, these female qazis argue that they in fact uphold true Islamic legal principles more authentically than do many of their male counterparts. As Khatun Shaikh argues, male qazis in India often freely approve customs, including male-enacted instant divorce and polygamous marriages, that violate the ethical standards of marital conduct demanded in the Qur'an.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, whenever the BMMA's female qazis find themselves dealing with marital breakdown or divorce, they adhere more closely to the Qur'an's own principles concerning dispute resolution: those of arbitration (tehkim), mediation (sulh), and conciliation (wasatah).Footnote ⁸⁰ Wherever possible, the qazis seek to maintain communication between parties: sometimes they aim to facilitate reconciliation or, in other cases, they promote negotiated separations, seeking to broker divorces based on the fairest possible settlement.Footnote ⁸¹ In this, they claim to differ from the more careless, flippant approaches to these matters of some male clerics, who give little consideration to women's views and thus can place them in vulnerable situations.

To cultivate this legitimacy as legal authorities, the female qazis, like the founders of women's mosque movements, refer to legitimizing figureheads from Islamic history. In particular, they look to the Prophet's wife A'isha, who is lauded as a major legal authority through her issuing of important fatwas (decisions), many of which focused upon women's religious conduct and rights. As put by Jahan Aara, a passionate, recently certified ‘qazi’ from Jaipur: ‘We have kept our training and knowledge as close as possible to that of the Prophet's wife. At one point, we were on a TV programme with a [male] mufti (jurist), who mocked us by asking whether we had the same level of knowledge as did A'isha. We responded by asking whether today's men have the same kind of wisdom as the Prophet.’Footnote ⁸² By the reasoning of these qazis themselves, they are thus renewing the model of legal interpretation set by the female legal scholars of the Companionate era.

The increasing reach and success of the BMMA's qazis is evidenced in their recent achievement of officiating a Muslim marriage. In January 2019, the BMMA's qazi Hakima Khatun, based in Kolkata, solemnized the nikah ceremony of a Muslim couple from Mumbai who had approached the organization. This officiation of a nikah at the behest of a Muslim women's organization was the most high-profile such act since 2008 and garnered significant media coverage.Footnote ⁸³ While the qazis of the BMMA's shari‘ah ‘adalats have received large numbers of approaches in recent years to handle marital breakdowns, they receive few enquiries from couples willing to invite a female qazi to preside over their marriage, either due to the couple's own reluctance or the fear of disapproval from their families.Footnote ⁸⁴ This qazi's recent achievement in doing this, the BMMA argues, may now influence ‘more Mayas and Shamauns [the names of the couple in question]’ to come forward; indeed, some qazis note that women whom they have assisted in the past have pledged to come to them to officiate their future (and often second) marriages, or to officiate the marriages of their children.Footnote ⁸⁵

These female-led shari‘ah ‘adalats, like the women's mosque movements, thus comprise bold attempts to renovate accepted religious conventions as a means of overhauling community realities. Appointing female voices able to decide authoritatively on Islamic legal principles—defending women during marital difficulties, negotiating fair divorces, and even officiating marriages—are all part of a wider ambition to question bastions of male authority such as the mosque brotherhoods and shari‘ah councils that position themselves as the local guardians of family affairs. Moreover, these shari‘ah ‘adalats illustrate perfectly how India's particular legal framework for handling minority affairs has informed the strategies adopted by Muslim women's activists. With many personal law matters never coming before courts or official bodies, being adjudicated entirely by religious leaders or community forums, women's groups have had to appropriate equivalent non-state and paralegal strategies for resolving women's problems. While they do routinely refer women to official institutions such as the police or family courts for assistance, they find themselves sometimes needing to confront aspects of Muslim personal law exercised from within local community structures to have real impact. Working as qazis within women-led shari‘ah ‘adalats has become their mechanism for resolving women's difficulties from inside the framework of local community and everyday religion.

Women claiming the shrine

Compared with the mosque, madrasa, or Islamic court, the confessional structures of Sufism have historically often been more open to female participation. Female saints have been relatively commonplace figures in Islamic history and have been imbibed with charismatic authority (barakah) equivalent to that of male pirs. Equally, the comparative openness of Sufi orders and shrines to female practitioners have allowed women's meaningful engagement with Sufi piety.Footnote ⁸⁶ South Asia itself, for instance, has a wealth of historical female saints and shrines built in their honour, and women, even when excluded from mosques and community brotherhoods, are frequent visitors to Sufi shrines.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is thus unsurprising that Sufism has been appropriated in the service of contemporary Muslim women's activism. Globally, a number of Islamic feminist thinkers in recent years have identified Sufism as a source of inspiration for constructing female religious agency. Prominent scholars have recalled stories of Islam's female saints and contemporary mystics,Footnote ⁸⁸ while others, like the self-declared Islamic ‘feminist’ Sa‘diyya Shaikh, have used the liberating potentialities of Sufism as a basis for recognizing spiritual equivalence between genders and developing more gender-equal interpretations of Islamic laws and traditions.Footnote ⁸⁹ The work of Shaikh and others has hinted at how women's religious empowerment might be sought in their allegiance to a chosen waali, a Sufi saint, as an alternative to passive deference to a wali, a male family guardian.

Echoing these global trends, women's activists in India have been drawn to Sufism's emancipating potentialities. Activists in this new generation of Muslim women's organizations sometimes suggest that allegiance to a saint can give individual women direct personal guidance, liberating them from the whims of conservative male mullahs who position themselves as middlemen between man and God.Footnote ⁹⁰ Some women's activists allude to Sufi influence upon their work for women's empowerment in the simple form of broad-brush references to Sufism as proof of Islam's ethics of equality and rightfulness (musawat, sulook). Some recall childhood visits to shrines in Delhi, Ajmer, and Gujarat; others talk about drawing their own inspiration from ‘mysticism’ (a term transplanted directly into Hindi); others still convey their motivations in Sufi-inspired idioms, like receiving guidance from God in dreams.Footnote ⁹¹ Some activists also refer to the lives of female saints as inspiration, including figures from South Asia; most strikingly perhaps, some recall the life-story of Hazrat Baba Jaan, a female Pashtun mystic from Baluchistan, who attracted fame as a migrant ascetic and miracle-worker in the slums of Pune in the 1900s.Footnote ⁹² Moreover, a striking number of activists have chosen the names of female saints, like Rabia, Rukaiya, and ‘Aliya, for their daughters.

Alongside these invocations of Sufi piety, in some recent cases women's activists have ventured to transform aspects of normative Sufi practice that infringe the ethics of equality: for instance, by confronting the male custodial stranglehold over certain Sufi spaces. The key example was a campaign in 2014–2016, led by the BMMA, to win women's access to a well-known Sufi shrine. The dargah of the little-documented saint Pir Haji Ali Shah Bukhari juts out into the ocean via a walkway off the coast of Mumbai, and for most of its existence, it has been open to both male and female worshippers.Footnote ⁹³ In 2012 the dargah's custodian body, the Haji Ali Trust, closed the shrine to women, justifying the decision on the somewhat spurious grounds of protecting women from harassment within the shrine and because ‘their saris might fall off’ as they leant over the mazar.Footnote ⁹⁴ In response, the BMMA's leaders filed a petition with the Bombay High Court against the Haji Ali Trust, arguing that barring entry to women was an infringement of their constitutional rights to equality and to freedom of religious practice (specifically, Articles 14, 15, and 25). This legal challenge to a body that saw itself as deputizing for the saint himself was ultimately upheld by the court, leading to the shrine being reopened to female worshippers. The court victory in 2016 was widely celebrated a triumph for Muslim feminists,Footnote ⁹⁵ and in hindsight, is often interpreted by BMMA members as a precursor to the organization's significant court victory in the instant triple-talaq judgment in 2017.Footnote ⁹⁶

This example is somewhat distinct from other cases discussed in this article in that the BMMA here identified the state judiciary as the chosen agent for altering religious conventions. Rather than making interventions into community networks and social institutions, as in the other discussed examples, the BMMA turned to the High Court. It largely argued to exact changes in religious practice on the basis of constitutional rights of gender equality and freedom of religion. Yet, the nature of the court case itself, in which the BMMA's leaders challenged the shrine's hereditary custodians, compelled them to invoke religious claims and cast themselves as cognisant Islamic authorities alongside their position as court petitioners. They assembled documentary evidence that included a compilation of Qur'anic and hadith references upholding women's spiritual equality, statements from well-known contemporary clerics (like Gibril Haddad of Lebanon) supporting female participation in Sufi rites and shrine attendance, and a sociological survey of Mumbai's dargahs claiming that a majority (12 of 19) admitted women.Footnote ⁹⁷

Moreover, while the campaign was fought through the courts, it was portrayed by its proponents as a quest for spiritual empowerment. BMMA leaders retrospectively present the legal campaign itself in Sufi imagery and idioms, describing their struggle emotively as a spiritual ‘journey’ (ziyarat) marked by ‘triumphs and tribulations’ at every ‘stage’ (maqam), invoking imagery resonant of the Sufi path to fulfilment.Footnote ⁹⁸ Even more explicit was the ritual of stepping into the dargah soon after the court victory. Having assembled a female crowd to walk along the overpass towards the shrine and gather within the shrine's inner sanctum in an event visually reminiscent of an act of collective pilgrimage and supplication to the saint, the event blurred the imagery of activist rally and religious rite, perhaps affirming the sacredness of India's Muslim women's movement itself.