Lucknow-based Parveen Abidi heads the All-India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB), an organization of Indian Muslim women set up in 2005 as a reaction to what these women perceived to be the anti-women stance and unwarranted patriarchal interpretations of Islam of the almost wholly male All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). The AIMWPLB may not be very visible, and its achievements might still be somewhat modest, but its founding marked the beginnings of an autonomous Muslim women’s movement in India to argue for gender justice using Islamic arguments, often against the claims of the patriarchal maulvis, as Abidi tells Yoginder Sikand in this interview.

Q: What made you set up a separate Muslim women’s personal law board, a decision that was met with much scorn and derision by many maulvis as well as other Muslim men?

A: The women who set up the Board were all very upset with the stance of the AIMPLB. They were shocked with how many of the maulvis on the Board were so vociferously opposed to gender justice, and even to the rights given to Muslim women by Islam. We felt that the AIMPLB was pronouncing on all sorts of issues related to Muslim women, generally in a manner very detrimental to us, but yet we, who were most immediately affected by their pronouncements, had no voice or forum of our own.

The AIMPLB was, and still is, almost wholly blind to the concerns of oppressed Muslim women. It wrongly interpreted the shariah to equate it, for all practical purposes, with male privilege and women’s subordination. The few women members of the Board are just figureheads and have no effective voice of their own. They simply cannot dare dissent from the opinion of the maulvis. That is why we felt the need for a separate Muslim women’s personal law board, where we Muslim women could represent ourselves.

The AIMWPLB was formally established in January 2005, when a group of women from different parts of India had got together—incidentally, for a wedding in our family in Lucknow. Some of our husbands—and other men, of course—were not quite happy with the name we had given our organization. They thought we were being deliberately provocative, trying to challenge the authority of the maulvis of the AIMPLB. But, still, we insisted on keeping the name.

Q: But do you think it is right to generalize about the maulvis like this? Surely, at least some of them must be sensitive to the problems of Muslim women?

A: Of course, one cannot generalize about any group of people. We have some women ulema—or alimas—in our organization, who have received a traditional Islamic education. One of them is a graduate of the girls’ wing of the Nadwat ul-Ulema, in Lucknow. Another is a Shia woman scholar. Our organization is open to all—we have both Shia and Sunni members. Within the Shias, we have Imamis, Bohras and even a Khojah. Some of our Sunnis members are from Barelvi families, others are Deobandis. We also work with women’s activists from Hindu and other backgrounds.

Q: What sort of work is the AIMWPLB engaged in?

A: Our work is, by and large, informal—it’s more like a loose network of Muslim women activists in different parts of India. One of our notable achievements was a model nikahnamah that we drafted which seeks to protect Muslim women, particularly with regard to divorce and polygamy.

Some of our members organize legal awareness camps in Muslim slums for poor Muslim women. We try and tell them that to meekly accept the beatings by their husbands is not, contrary to what they have been reared to believe, something that they should passively accept in the name of Islam. We tell them that if their husbands divorce them at will, such an action is not at all Islamically acceptable, no matter how vociferously the mullahs back the men. We tell them that if a man neglects providing for his wife and children, it is un-Islamic. And so on. This sensitization and awareness-building at the ‘grassroots’ is something really crucial. A lot more needs to be done in this regard, of course.

We also seek to present Muslim women’s voices and concerns and what we regard as the authentic Islamic position on a host of controversial fatwas and judgments on issues related to Muslim personal law that directly impinge on the lives of Muslim women.  This is very important, for if we don’t speak out, the conservative, patriarchal maulvis will continue to misinterpret Islam to reinforce women’s subordination. Much of their posturing is hypocritical and self-serving. So, for instance, when Fatima Jinnah, wife of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, contested elections in Pakistan, the Jamaat-e Islami enthusiastically backed her, but now, in India, some mullahs have passed a fatwa claiming that Islam forbids women from standing for elections! One can cite so many more such contradictory and patently unjust fatwas if one wanted to.

The point is that the maulvis, by and large, want to keep Muslim women subordinated. If Muslim women become aware, then, they fear, whom can they rule over?

Q: But, to come back to a point I made earlier, surely not all the maulvis are the same in this regard?

A: No, I did not mean to suggest that, but I think the vast majority are not quite enthusiastic about women becoming aware of their rights. In this regard, I must cite a singular exception—Maulana Kalbe Sadiq, the noted Shia scholar from Lucknow, who has consistently and wholeheartedly supported our work.  But, in contrast, I know of some mullahs who condemn us as deviant and accuse us of seeking to lead Muslim women astray. Our activists meet with Muslim women in the slums, whose lives are taken up only with producing and rearing babies. We tell them that Islam does, in fact, allow for certain forms of family planning, but the mullahs  quickly brand us ‘agents of enemies of Islam’—of the government or even the RSS—for our views. Some of our opponents have even gone so far as to equate us with the exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, threatening that we would be made to face the same fate as her.

Q: The AIMPLB has appealed to Muslims to try to settle their personal law-related disputes through the chain of shariah courts or dar ul-qazas that—or so it claims—it has set up across the country. How do you view this suggestion?

A: I don’t see why we should do this. We must use the state courts, because in the dar ul-qazas women are bound to meet with the same sort of judgments that weigh so heavily against them because the men who staff them—maulvis from the madrasas—are themselves so heavily patriarchal.

Q: But the maulvis are supposed to be—or so they claim— authoritative spokesmen of Islam, isn’t it?

A: They might claim to be to be so, but, as a believing Muslim woman, I refuse to accept their claim. From the fatwas and writings of many of them anyone would easily get the impression that Islam simply teaches women to shut up and meekly accept male domination. But that is not what I believe to be Islam. Islam, as I understand it, does not stand in the way of justice and equality for women, unlike what many of the maulvis claim. Islam does not preach hatred and enmity, unlike what the radical Islamists, men like the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, insist. So, as far as I am concerned, if some mullah interprets Islam in a manner that violates human rights, I cannot accept his interpretation as authentically Islamic at all. It is really as simple as that.