DIFFERENT REGISTERS
Agents of change
C.S. LAKSHMI
D. Sharifa at the State Level Conference on Muslim Women's Rights andEmpowerment, organised by STEPS.
ON September 11, the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women's Jamaat Committee organised a hunger strike in Madurai for a day. The Muslim Women's Jamaat Committee is the brainchild of Sharifa, who is the Director of STEPS Women's Development Organisation. The hunger strike was to bring attention to the problems of Muslim women and to demand that the State and Central governments use their existing welfare schemes for the betterment of Muslim women. The hunger strike was also a protest against the way in which male-dominated Jamaats have been functioning. The hunger strike was not a token one, for, one of the points that the Muslim Women's Jamaat Committee proposed to emphasise and act upon was the need to establish an institution which will give women an opportunity to speak and seek justice and extend solidarity to other Muslim women through this institution. The institution Sharifa and the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women's Jamaat Committee are thinking of, is a mosque for women.
A space to pray
A Jamaat is a community of male elders who adjudicate on family matters. For the last five years STEPS has been concentrating on issues concerning Muslim women because they have been receiving petitions from Muslim women regarding the injustice being meted out to Muslim women by the Jamaat. To tackle this issue, STEPS organised several workshops, seminars and conferences. From this evolved the idea to build a separate mosque for women as a space to pray, to meet, to talk, to discuss grievances and to adjudicate on family matters.
Sharifa and the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women's Jamaat Committee have been directly confronting religious leaders and male scholars who have been arguing that Muslim women have more respect in their community than a Hindu or a Christian. They point out that Islam accepts widow remarriage, the right to divorce and access to property. According to Sharifa, all this might have been true in the Prophet's period when women had free access to the mosque and also to the Prophet's abode to clarify their doubts. But at present, the Muslim woman's fate is decided by some of the practices that have become part of Islamic customs. Today's Muslim woman has to pay a huge dowry in order to get married. The Islamic custom of mehar is also there but while the mehar is a token amount, the dowry demanded by the groom's family can be an exorbitant amount. Talaq has three stages before the separation can be pronounced finally but most men who have said Talaq over the phone, by letter, through the Jamaat and even through the internet, have treated this casually. And the Jamaat decides on issues like dowry, divorce, domestic violence, custody and child abuse without the presence of the woman concerned, for, the Jamaat sits in the mosque where the women are not allowed. The woman cannot give her side of the story nor can she hear the judgement although what is being discussed intimately concerns her as a person.
Fighting exclusion
A Muslim woman I met in STEPS told me that her brother or father could represent her case before the Jamaat. She said, "They can talk about whether I had physical comforts or not in my husband's family. But how can they talk about my feelings or about sexual abuse about which only I can speak of?" The outcome of Jamaat dealing with these issues and passing judgements was that a woman's case was being dealt with without her, she was being talked about without her being there, and the judgement was also being made without her. The brochure on the mosque points out that women may be sitting as beggars in front of the mosque but all that the religious people of the mosque would bother to check is if she is observing purdha.
STEPS and the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women's Jamaat Committee are already intervening in several cases where the Jamaat and the police have meted out injustice to Muslim women, by offering legal counselling and legal action and by working out ways to make the women economically independent and self-reliant. A mosque is only the legitimate next step in this process. They feel that a mosque for women will free the Muslim women from the cleric-controlled Jamaats and also give the Muslim women a social space within their own community. Not only will it be a meeting place and a forum where they can give vent to their own feelings but it will also be an agent of change because the mosque will help propagate issues like health and education. The mosque will also give them a legitimate space to speak from regarding one-sided Talaqs and other issues and deal with them.
Resolving issues
Initially when the idea of a mosque for women was mooted, some enlightened Jamaat members of the Parambur village in Pudukkottai came forward to provide a plot of land for the mosque. But the Ulemas from all over India threatened them and they backed out. And then began character assassination of women involved in this activity taken up by STEPS and then accusations that a political party was pressurising them to do this. There have also been death threats. Despite all this, if members of STEPS are adamant about building the mosque it is because they sincerely believe in resolving issues and not containing them. The planned mosque will be a proper one with minarets and with a woman moulvi who is well versed in the Quran and the tenets of Islam. From there would emerge voices loud and clear like the following one an ordinary Muslim woman composed in one of the conferences:
...
The life we have lived begging,
Is not a life worth living
These are times when we have to demand
Let us come together
And dare to question —
No more succumbing with bent heads
Every day feels like death
Due to this double-faced justice
When we make the law for men
Then will they learn
Let us talk of a common justice
And attain our victory...
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
