Muslim Women's Quest for Justice
Gender, Law and Activism in India

This book is an urban ethnographic study of several Muslim women's organisations in northern India.

Mengia Hong Tschalaer (Author)

9781107155770, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2017

272 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.9 cm, 0.46 kg

'Carefully historicized and brimming with nuanced analysis, this book shows the discursive and political strategies through which overlapping and at times competing women's organizations navigate a contested and complicated public sphere, as they seek to curate a gender emancipatory understanding of Islam. The major strength of this book is the way it presents a vivid picture of the quest for gender justice on the ground, leavened by such critical processes as the composition of gender-just nikah-namas. This important book will engage the interests of a range of scholars and courses on Islam, gender, South Asia, and Islamic law and society.' SherAli Tareen, New Books Network (www.newbooksnetwork.com)

This book is an urban ethnographic study of several Muslim women's organisations in northern India. These organisations work to carve out spaces that allow for the articulation of alternative experiences and conceptions of religion and justice that challenge Islamic orthodoxy as well as the monopoly of the Indian state in the domain of family law. While most analyses on reform efforts within Muslim family law in India have focused on women's protection within the state legal system, this book offers the rare opportunity to understand how organised groups of Muslim women's rights activists contest marginalising forces present in the family and criminal courts, Shariat courts, local mosques, workplace, legislature and legal documents. It pushes against troubling assumptions that Islam is incompatible with ideas of women's rights and that the State is the only dispenser of justice, and offers new directions for studies on the dispersed nature of women's identities in Islamic family law.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1. From legal binaries to configurations: Muslim women's rights activism in South Asia
2. A multidimensional approach to Muslim women's activism: mapping the legal landscape in the city of Lucknow
3. Destabilising gendered proprieties: Muslim women's visibility within the public space
4. Vying for a gender just Islamic marriage contract: women's legal spaces
5. Legal realities: doing gender justice from below
6. Muslim women's quest for justice: theoretical implications and policy suggestions
Appendices: model-nikahnamas
Glossary
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Social law [LNT], Family law [LNM], Gender & the law [LAQG], Law & society [LAQ], Islamic law [LAFS], Law [L], Sociology [JHB], Sociology & anthropology [JH]