Having never been a sports-watcher, I just didn’t notice that Sania Mirza was playing in skimpy skirts rather than shorts until the bellicose Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind issued dire warnings about her ‘un-Islamic’ attire. Avid secularists promptly pleaded that the tennis star be allowed to live like a ‘normal’ 18-year-old and Kolkata Police wisely beefed up security for the WTA event in their city.
Yet given Sania’s insistence on emphasizing her Islamic identity by publicly stating she does ‘namaaz’ five times a day, it is difficult for outsiders to argue that a faith impervious to change and reform give one girl special freedom on account of her achievements in the secular realm. At the risk of seeming unsympathetic, it needs be said that neither Sania nor her family has credited the secular nature of the Indian State or the famed tolerance of Indian society for her liberty to nurture her talent. Nor did they keep their religious beliefs in the private domain.
Having showcased their Islamic moorings, they will have to publicly join the protagonists of reform in Indian Islam if they wish to satisfy ‘secular’ cravings, such as an international career, great fame and big money. Else, they should fall in line with the Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, for it is well known that Islam demands complete conformity from believers and does not permit piecemeal or eclectic endorsement of its tenets (this is a Hindu luxury).
The Sania fatwa presents a grim challenge to Islam’s secular apologists. Dynamic Muslim women achievers will no longer be able to use their personal fame and fortune to build islands of security and immunity from the local or national-level maulvi. Indeed, they will now be the new targets of abuse and intimidation, in order to secure the victory of the Shariat and its guardians. It is now upto enlightened Muslim men and women to admit that the practice (if not some tenets) of their faith is not in tune with the times, and fails to satisfy their worldly aspirations. They would do well to join the public interest litigation currently before the Supreme Court, seeking an end to the functioning of Shariat courts in the country, and putting curbs upon the unfettered powers of maulvis.
In one sense, this is an internal matter of the Muslim community, and meaningful reforms will be possible only if voices are raised within the community, an initiative taken by the Tamil Nadu women’s jamaat. But in a larger sense, no group is an island, and we are all morally obliged to support citizens needing State intervention to avail of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. But it is going to be difficult for us to press for legal restraints upon Islamic clergy if our Muslim brethren and their secular minders do not refrain from vicious Hindu-bashing every time issues internal to Islamic society crop up in the public domain.
Recently, when the Imrana rape case highlighted the ulema’s regressive approach and brought into the open instances of rank injustice towards Muslim women, many Muslim intellectuals and secular apologists equated the outrage with unequal inheritance laws in Hindu society! Such ridiculous obfuscation of issues will not help Muslim women being oppressed by communal pressures, and in fact demean the desperate desire for reform among those who do not know how to escape their current suffocation.
In Hilwari village of Baghpat, UP, Sharif divorced Khursheeda in anger, but soon repented and proposed re-marriage. This was not possible in Islam without Khursheeda marrying again (for one night) and getting a divorce. As the family wished to spare the couple undue trauma, they suggested Khursheeda marry Sharif’s 13-year-old brother, get divorced the next day, and re-marry Sharif (Hindustan Times, 10 August 2005).
But the maulvis opposed this, insisting Khursheeda maintain a period of purity prescribed in the Shariat and then marry a man able to consummate the marriage before divorcing her. This is an undignified law and Muslims are unhappy with it. Families in this predicament deserve support from vocal activists like Shabnam Hashmi, Shahbana Azmi, Nafisa Ali, Suhasini Ali, Teesta Setalvad, and Javed Akhtar. But they have been conspicuous by their silence, and it is left to us to plead for abolition of instantaneous talaq and transit marriage (halala) before remarriage to the ex-spouse.
It is difficult not to recall the sad episode of Gudiya, who remarried after the Indian Army declared her husband, Mohammad Arif, dead, and was pregnant when he suddenly returned from a Pakistani jail in September 2004. Instead of facilitating divorce so that Gudiya could live with dignity with the second family, the ulema made return to her legal husband a prestige issue for Shariat. Although Gudiya, her second husband, and her entire village wanted the jawan to go away, the poor girl was browbeaten in a televised and lopsided panchayat, and forced to return to Arif with the abetment of the secular media.
India’s Islamic apologists are caught between a rock and hard place because they do not realize that though political appeasement of Islam continues as before, Islam has shed the quietist nature of the early Independence era and become politically ambitious and assertive. For four decades, Congress thrived on a pathetic minority of votes due to en bloc voting ensured by ulema. In turn, Muslim leaders extracted concessions which intensified their control over the community by promoting separatism and ghettoisation; educated Muslims supported orthodoxy in return for some personal immunity, which the ulema now wants to withdraw.
The triumph of Shia Islam with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, however, caused the Saudi ruling family to peddle fundamentalist Wahabi Islam as an antidote to Ayatollah Khomeini, possibly with the blessings of America, which was unhappy at the fall of its puppet regime. In India, Islamic mobilization was tested a decade later when a lawyer rallied the orthodox after his divorced wife, Shah Bano, won a paltry alimony from the Supreme Court.
Few could have foreseen the consequences of the Shah Bano case. Muslim women activists say that till then, the women were getting alimony from civil courts, just like Hindu women. But the cry of ‘Islam in danger’ led Darul-Uloom to dub this an infringement of personal law, as Islam does not provide alimony for divorcees. The All-India Muslim Personal Law Board was set up, and a blissfully ignorant Rajiv Gandhi caved in.
But the Shah Bano case was no ordinary surrender. Representatives of an irredentist global Islam were unwittingly, but officially, ceded the ‘diwani’ (jurisdiction) of India’s Muslim community. They quickly assumed totalitarian control over Muslims, but gave the nazrana (votes) to rising Chatrapatis like V.P. Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Yadav. This betrayal was not because Congress had failed them in any respect, but to expand their political leverage! That the Assam agitation against Bangladeshi infiltration also climaxed in the early 1980s indicates how Islam synergized over the decades to achieve a staggering demographic and electoral advantage.
Today, ambitious Islam is challenging the Indian state and the innate decency of the Hindu community. As its first victims, Muslims must insist that the law of the land prevail over personal laws. Sania Mirza is rich and privileged; Imrana poor and disadvantaged. Both are equally threatened by repulsive medieval decrees; Muslim activists must speak up for both of them.
The Pioneer, 20 September 2005