Muslim Women's Quest for Justice: Gender, Law and Activism in India (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)
Cambridge University Press, 7/4/2017
EAN 9781107155770, ISBN10: 1107155770
Hardcover, 272 pages, 23.9 x 16.5 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
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.