wage earners are usually in weaker economic and
political positions than men with similar skills.
Middle-class women are progressively better edu-
cated and pursue work outside the home. However,
their image also remains predominantly that of
home-maker.
While the acquisition of knowledge is enjoined on
all, the knowledge is limited for most children, and
specially for girls, to the learning by rote of some
portions of the Qur±àn. In the colonial period,
because Muslims were accused of being “back-
ward” partly because of the condition of Muslim
women, reform of this backwardness, such as the
attempts of Sir Sayyid A™mad Khàn, stressed the
importance of education. While schools and educa-
tional programs for girls came to be seen as indica-
tive of progress, it was considered essential to retain
signs of the community, such as the practices of pur-
dah and seclusion, alongside education.
Important family sacraments include the nikà™,
marriage contract, which is a sunnaof the Prophet.
The bars to marriage are blood relationship or con-
sanguinity between the woman and her male ascen-
dants and descendants, and relationship by marriage
or affinity. Dowry is a practical bar to celebrating
the birth of girls on an equal footing with boys.
Although theoretically undesirable in Islam, it is
prevalent, like purdah, across class divisions, but
markedly in upwardly mobile families. Divorce
(†alàq) is permissible, and though not frequent, is
discriminatory against women. Mahr, or the bride-
price settled specifically upon women, could theo-
retically be a counter to easy divorce, except that
most mahramounts are relatively low, and most
women are prevailed upon to forego mahrpay-
ments. Women are guaranteed rights to inheritance
but, as with mahr, may be dissuaded from claiming
them, and only a few cases of non-observance are
taken to court.
The nationalist state in India, with its consti-
tution of 1950, guarantees equal rights to all its cit-
izens and makes special provisions for women. But
the Indian state has been “communal” in that it has
relied on an identity that was Sanskritic and on
institutions such as personal law to cover the areas
of marriage, divorce, adoption, and inheritance.
Personal law, defended by the community as essen-
tial for its self-definition, and condemned by both
progressivists and fundamentalists as regressive in
its denial of rights to the individual, is itself a
hybrid. It was concocted over two hundred and
more years by the colonial state with its fears and
prejudices, from selected oral testimonies, Indian
interpreters’ reports, colonial constructions, and
south asia 143internal debates within classes of people in India.
Muslim personal law may be criticized for its
adherence to polygamy, easy divorce by men, and
unequal rights of inheritance. The state, in its con-
tinued acceptance of this law, as well as through all
other legal and political measures, supports the
community in its gendered exercise of power.
While modesty and chastity in both men and
women are highly prized, and the Qur±àn asks both
men and women to lower their eyes, it is women
who are veiled. Everyday life, to be properly Islamic,
is supposed to be defined by sharm(modesty and
self-effacement on the part of women). Purdah as
the worn garment or veil indicates varying exercise
of control and agency. Its wearing is largely in
inverse relationship to modern education, occupa-
tion, and self-consciousness. But its wearing also
permits a degree of autonomy and freedom, and is
liberating for women in giving them the ability to
move about almost freely and engage in almost any
occupation. In contemporary times, the covering of
the self can also be a political statement of women’s
control over their own choices and lives.
Purdah, literally curtain, or the physical seclu-
sion of women, is practiced also through the sepa-
ration of public/outside space and private/inside
space, and then through the segregation of domes-
tic space as men’s and women’s. Whether it be one
room or a self-sufficient section of a capacious
house, there is a “separate world” for women,
enforced by the design of spaces and buildings. This
confinement, while a hindrance to equality, is also
a source of agency and power for women.
In Pakistan and Bangladesh there is a patriarchal
unity of purpose between the state and the commu-
nity, and change in inegalitarian gender relations
within the family occurs gradually through reform.
In India, there is, ironically, a similar unity between
a secular/Hindu state and the Muslim community,
but reform becomes more elusive because, as in
colonial times, the community can claim its auton-
omy from “external” interference and resist legal
and educational change.Bibliography
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Muslims, Delhi 1976.
——,Divorce and remarriage among Muslims in India,
Delhi 2003.
V. R. Bevan Jones and L. Bevan Jones, Women in Islam. A
manual with special reference to conditions in India,
Lucknow 1941, repr. Westport, Conn. 1987.
N. Haksar, Campaign for a uniform code, in A. R. Desai
(ed.), Women’s liberation and politics of religious per-
sonal laws in India, Bombay 1986, 47–51.
Z. Hasan (ed.), Forging identities. Gender, communities
and the state, Delhi 1994.