‘Acting upon our Religion’: Muslim women's movements and the remodelling of Islamic practice in India

Abstract

AbstractIn the last 15 years, India has witnessed the expression of a variety of new non-conformist religious practices performed by Muslim women. A range of vibrant campaigns has been pioneered by Muslim women's associations, asserting women's claims to hold and lead congregational prayers, enter and manage mosques, visit shrines, officiate Muslim marriages, and issue shari‘ah-based legal decisions. This article explores the twin questions of why these experimental remodellings of women's Islamic observance and leadership have been so pronounced in the Indian context compared with much of the Islamic world, and furthermore, why Muslim women's rights activists have put such confessional matters at the centre of their work. Exploring a series of specific female-led assertions of religious agency centring upon mosques, shari‘ah councils, and a Sufi shrine, the article argues that India's variant of ‘secularism’, which has normalized the state's non-intervention in religious institutions and laws, has given women the freedom to embark upon overhauls of Islamic conventions denied to their counterparts elsewhere. Simultaneously, this same framework for handling religious questions has historically given intra-community and clerical voices particular influence in regulating Muslim community affairs and family laws, compelling activists to seek women's empowerment in individual and local community contexts to further their objectives, including through the assertion of experimental forms of religious conduct.