democracy. But even among those who reject a
UCC, there have been many diverging voices, going
back more than 30 years (Fyzee 1971), who plead
strongly for reforms within the MPL, and for a con-
ceptual distinction between what they consider the
path ordained by God and the man-made corpus of
jurisprudence.
Conclusion: Muslim women as
symbols and targets
Authored by men, reformist literature of the
mid-late nineteenth century (for example, Mir±àt
al-≠arùs[The bride’s mirror] by Nazìr A™mad in
1869 and Bihisht-i Zewar [Heavenly oranaments]
by the Deobandi scholar Ashraf ≠AlìThànawì)
served upper-class Muslim women as practical
guides to family and religious life. Simultaneously,
with the Muslim conception of Islamic law being
confined by British rule “to the parameters laid
down for it by colonial imperatives,” “reformist
fervor focused on women’s rights in marriage,
divorce and inheritance” (Jalal 2001, 72), and
MPL became the core of South Asian Muslim iden-
tity. The All-India Anjuman-i-Khawatin-i Islam
(Muslim Women’s Conference) attempted several
reforms (Minault 1998), passing a resolution against
polygamy in 1918 and lobbying to enable women
to initiate divorce through delegation (†alàq-i
tafwì∂). In postcolonial India, Muslims as an
increasingly embattled minority must necessarily
perceive any change in personal laws as a threat to
community identity and survival. Here, women are
projected as the cornerstone of this identity, both
by those who attack it and those who defend it.
Though in practice polygamy is at least as frequent
among non-Muslims as among Muslims, and
because of greater poverty live births among
Muslims are lower than among Hindus, fascist
Hindutva rhetoric in India has cobbled up an image
of the “Muslim woman” as a breeding ground for
millions of fanatic, violent, and “backward,” “anti-
national” Muslims. Simultaneously, the shades of
opinion among Muslims regarding wide ranging
reforms within the MPL are largely ignored, in
attempts to portray the community as a homoge-
neous, threatening whole.
Since women are used as symbols of their respec-
tive communities, they are also targeted as such. A
much publicized case was the persecution of the
Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasreen for, among
other things, writing about the repression of women
and its effects on their health. Less known perhaps,
is how individual and gang rape are used as instru-
ments of repression: during partition in 1947,
thereafter in every “communal riot” in India, by
south asia 343the Pakistani army in Bangladesh, and by Indian
security personnel in Kashmir. The Gujarat geno-
cide of 2002 (IIJG 2003) highlights how central
sexual violence is to the state sponsored Hindutva
project and its newly constructed notions of honor
and virility. But women are also perpetrators.
Mothers and mothers-in-law instigate, encourage,
and participate in “honor killings,” just as much as
men do. Upper-class Pakistani women lauded their
raping soldiers for attempts to “improve the race”
of Bangladeshis, and in September 2003 women
activists of the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami demon-
strated against the proposed repeal of the Hudood
Ordinances. Women members of Hindutva associ-
ations and even women members of parliament
from extreme right-wing parties in India have abet-
ted young Hindu men to attack Muslims and their
places of worship, spurring them on in the name of
“male honor” and “national pride.”
Social, economic, and political conflict at various
levels of South Asian society exacerbate the situa-
tion of all women, including Muslim women, and
deep-seated fear of social boycott and physical
reprisal coupled with the state’s implicit if not
explicit complicity in crimes against women tend to
force the victims into silence. While the frequency
of abductions and rapes of village girls by state
sponsored gunmen in Indian-administered Kashmir
exemplifies their defencelessness in the context of a
war economy that has long ruptured a variety of
social institutions, the widespread sexual abuse of
children in Pakistan (nearly half of all children
there, according to Human Rights reports, see
Terzieff 2004) by village landlords and other men
in positions of authority and power testifies to the
weakness in practice of normative values. All South
Asian states have ratified the United Nations
Women’s Convention, and there are increasingly
active women’s movements in all these countries. It
remains to be seen how far their efforts will
impinge on the multiple ways in which the ideolo-
gies and practice of kinship affect Muslim women
and their relations with the state.Notes- In Islam the kinship of milk (ri∂à≠a), like that of
blood, restricts marriage between those considered to be
milk-siblings; by the same token it also functions to
broaden bonds between individuals and groups (for an
anthropological overview see Rao 2000, 107–12). - Similar “honor killings” (also known in certain
regions as vani) are equally prevalent in parts of northern
India among non-Muslims, especially middle- and upper-
caste Hindus and Sikhs, but no figures appear to be avail-
able. Such killings are also practiced among the South
Asian diaspora, for example in Britain and in Sweden.