http://www.islaminterfaith.org/
Shariah
Court Campaign in India: Battle for the Muslim Mind
Yoginder Sikand
At its eighteenth annual convention last month the All-India Muslim
Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) issued an appeal for Muslims to settle
their personal disputes in shariah courts or dar ul qazas instead of
approaching state courts for the purpose. Less than a fortnight
later, last week the Jamiat ul-‘Ulama-I Hind, an all-India body of
Deobandi mullahs, followed suit and passed a resolution at its
annual conference in Delhi making a similar demand. It called for
Muslim couples to sign what it called a ‘covenant’ at the time of
marriage agreeing that in the event of failure to resolve their
marital problems on their own they would authorise shariah courts
‘completely [sic.] to decide’ on the issue. The decision of these
courts would be binding on them. The covenant rules out any
possibility of the couple or of one party approaching state courts
for redress. ‘Even if they [the shariah courts] annul our nikah
[marriage]’, the covenant makes the couple undertake, ‘we will
accept their decision and shall not revert to court against it’. In
this way, the Jamiat, like the MPLB, is now seeking to bring all
Muslims under its ambit, propping itself as an alternate legal
authority.
The demand for separate shariah courts for Muslims in India is by no
means a new one. For many years now various ulama associations have
been demanding that Muslims should seek to have their family matters
settled by trained mullahs, instead of by judges in the secular
courts. They insist that mullahs are best able to understand and
interpret the shariah, including Muslim Personal Law (MPL),
suggesting that judges trained in a secular system, particularly if
they are non-Muslims, do not have the same qualifications to do so.
Indeed, so vociferously opposed are some of them to judges in state
courts interpreting MPL that they go so far as to claim that such
judges may be in league with ‘anti-Islamic’ forces to deliberately
misinterpret MPL as part of a alleged secret plot to smuggle in a
Uniform Civil Code and eventually to absorb the Muslims into the
Hindu fold. Advocates of shariah courts claim that their campaign
has the support of the entire Muslim community, because, so they
argue, this demand is actually mandated by Islam itself. To oppose
this, they suggest, is tantamount to opposing Islam, a sin
unthinkable by any practising Muslim. Muslims who resist this call
may, therefore, expect to be branded as apostates or at least as
traitors to the cause of Allah.
Appealing to Muslims to resort to the mullahs, rather than to the
courts, to settle their personal disputes is, of course, a means to
bolster the sagging prestige of the mullahs. Painfully aware that as
modern education spreads increasing numbers of Muslims can dispense
with the mullahs to interpret their religion for them, the mullahs
face a grave challenge to their authority. What better way, then, to
recover it than by insisting that Muslims must accept them as the
final arbiters of their destinies and that to refuse to do so is to
sin against Islam? To further seal that claim to authority the
mullahs can, if further emboldened, even go so far as to declare a
social boycott against those who refuse to abide by the decisions of
shariah courts, branding them as ‘anti-Islamic’ and as ‘agents’ of
the ‘enemies’ of Islam.
The shariah court campaign comes at a time when numerous Indian
Muslim women are beginning to mount an effective critique of the
mullahs, accusing them of preaching male supremacy in the name of
Islam. Islam, these women seem to be arguing, stands for gender
equality and justice. In this way, these women fiercely denounce the
patriarchal laws that the conservative mullahs seek to pass off in
the name of the shariah. Seen in this light, the recent appeals by
certain ulama associations for Muslims to set up shariah courts and
to abide by their dictates is also a means to silence recalcitrant
women, such as those associated with the newly formed Muslim women’s
personal law boards, who claim that educated Muslims can interpret
Islam on their own without the aid of the mullahs. It is also a way
to prevent Muslim women from seeking relief from state courts that,
as in the Shah Bano case, might provide a more gender-just reading
of MPL than what the mullahs are prepared to tolerate.
The support that the mullahs’ demand for shariah courts actually
enjoys among the Muslim community is debatable. Although many
Muslims might back it, significant numbers are critical of it and
many Muslims I know denounce it as wholly preposterous. A rough
indication of the diverse responses the proposal has met is provided
by the flood of mails that I have received in response to an essay I
wrote on the subject a week ago.
In his response to my article, a certain Shan Mohammmad, a college
student from Delhi, insists that the call for shariah courts is
‘fully legitimate’ on the grounds that ‘Muslims must follow whatever
the pious ulama say, because they are the successors of the Prophet
Muhammad’. Quoting Syed Abul ‘Ala Maududi, founder of the Islamist
Jama‘at-i Islami, he says, ‘Islam divides humanity into two, the
“friends of Allah” and the “friends of Satan”’. Islam also warns
Muslims not to take non-Muslims for ‘close friends or helpers’, he
claims. Hence, he insists, as far as possible Muslims must not seek
to get their cases decided by non-Muslim judges. In line with the
Jama’at-i Islami’s claim that Islam provides detailed laws for every
conceivable aspect of life, he declares, ‘Ultimately, Muslims, be
they in India or elsewhere, must struggle to have God’s laws
implemented in their entirety by a global Caliph’. ‘Man-made laws
have no place in God’s scheme of things’, he tells me, adding that
my opposition to shariah courts is ‘entirely misconceived’.
A similar ludicrous response comes from a certain Ghulam Muhammed
Siddiqui from Mumbai, whose major occupation seems to be shooting
off letters to newspaper editors protesting against every
conceivable case of Muslim suffering, real as well as imaginary. His
letters are to be found strewn over numerous Islamist sites on the
Internet and in various Muslim magazines. Inevitably, they relate
the same story: of hapless Muslims being persecuted by ill-willed
disbelievers. If Siddiqui is to be believed, non-Muslims seem to
have no other aim in life but to busy themselves plotting against
Muslims and their faith. It is also as if Muslims are not to blame
for any of their own ills, as if there exist no Muslim oppressors or
no good non-Muslims of any sort, and as if all Muslims are innocent,
badly misunderstood, lambs.
Siddiqui’s response to my article is predictable. While defending
the mullahs’ call for shariah courts, he announces: ‘It is time that
Indian Muslims should chose between the two virulent anti-Muslim
adversaries, the Left-Liberals and the Hindutva extremists, as to
who is their Enemy No.1”. “With propagandists like Yoginder Sikand
raking up and proposing a joint effort between the two anti-Muslim
forces”, he rants, “Muslims will have to beware of the soothing
words of liberals who are now becoming more and more like an
improved version of Hindutva in denying Muslims any right to live in
India as Muslims”. He sees my opposition to shariah courts as
reflecting the Left’s opposition to religion, claiming that
‘Left-Liberals’ are particularly opposed to Islam, which allegedly
unites them with Hindutva fascists. He ends his vituperative
diatribe by threatening that the Muslims’ ‘reaction’ to ‘the
machinations’ of ‘Left-Liberals’ like me who are opposed to the
shariah courts will ‘be as decisive as [the] Muslim response to
Hindutva’.
As these two responses so well illustrate, Islamist ideologues, like
their Hindutva counterparts, inhabit a frighteningly Manichaean
world, where pious believers are pitted against plotting enemies in
a struggle for global hegemony. Any critique of diehard
conservative mullahs or Islamist groups, no matter how well meaning,
comes to be construed as a hidden ploy against Islam, even if the
critique is not directed against Islam as such, as in the case of my
piece on shariah courts. This explains why a certain Sayyed Idris,
another vehement critic of my views on shariah courts, goes so far
as to denounce me as an ‘enemy of Islam’ in the guise of a
‘do-gooder’, although nowhere in my article have I critiqued Islam
at all. Judging by his profuse quotations from Maududi, he appears
to be another Jama’at-i Islami sympathiser. He is not the first
person to bestow me with the ‘enemy’ label, however. While some
Hindutva writers have for long been accusing me of being an
‘anti-Hindu pseudo secularist’, I have recently earned the ‘enemy of
Islam’ epithet after discovering that Hindutva fascists and Islamist
radicals need to be opposed equally consistently. Before that truth
dawned on me, my denunciations of Hindutva were regularly published
in the Jama‘at-i Islami’s weekly Radiance, but these stopped
completely ever I began speaking out against Islamists and
obscurantist mullahs as well. Unlike many other fellow Islamists,
Sayyed Idris, I must admit, is generous enough to acknowledge my
consistent opposition to Hindutva, in addition to radical Islamists
and bigoted mullahs. Yet, in true Islamist fashion, he sees in this
yet another ‘conspiracy’. ‘Your anti-Hindutva and pro-Muslim
articles’, he tells me, ‘are simply a clever ruse to fool gullible
Muslims in order to carry on with your anti-Islamic agenda’.
Interestingly, and this has given me some cause to feel cheerful
about, more Muslims have written to me to express their support of
my article than those who have sought to rubbish it. One of these is
a certain Raju Mohammad, an accountant from Chennai, who writes that
‘Muslims must focus on bread-and-butter issues instead of non-issues
like shariah courts’. The campaign for shariah courts, he warns,
‘will only play into the hands of Hindutva fascists, in the same way
as reactionary Muslim leaders did in the Shah Bano case that led,
finally, to the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the killing of
thousands of Muslims and the alarming rise of Hindutva’. He also
disagrees with the mullahs on their understanding of shariah.
‘Shariah is not a static entity, and the rules of shariah, humanly
interpreted in the form of jurisprudence or fiqh, can change over
time’, he says. However, he laments, most Islamists and mullahs are
‘opposed to such change, as that would undermine their own
authority’. Accusing them of ‘wrongly equating the ‘divine shariah’
with ‘human interpretation’, he insists that the demand that Muslims
resolve their personal matters in shariah courts, instead of state
courts, is ‘wholly mischievous’. It would, he claims, only further
‘fuel anti-Muslim passions and reinforce the image of Muslims being
anti-national and unwilling to live as normal citizens of a secular
state’.
Another Muslim who expresses his appreciation of my stand is a
certain Ghulam Faruki from New York. ‘Since, in all matters other
than Personal Law, Muslims have rightly obeyed the laws of the land
and accepted government appointed judges’, he writes, ‘and since the
results of this acquiescence have been satisfactory, extension of
such a paradigm would be considered a natural next step’. Hence, he
says, ‘attempts to set up separate courts are bound to be frustrated
as well as divisive, and probably retrograde’. “It does appear”, he
goes on, “that the AIMPLB is out of touch with reality and is unable
or unwilling to consider the consequences of its ill-advised
pronouncements”. He critiques the conservative mullahs of the AIMPLB
for what he calls ‘their dogmatic orthodoxy’ and for misinterpreting
Islam, which he describes as, in actual fact, a ‘liberating
religion’.
Faruki calls for Muslims to seek to understand their religion on
their own, denying the mullahs the power that he spies them as
hankering after. After all, he argues, ‘Islam is supposed to be a
religion of common sense, and therefore equally accessible to lay as
well as expert interpretations’. ‘If common sense is applied to a
simple and practical religion such as Islam’, he says, ‘it
diminishes the authority of the scholars and the experts, thereby
reducing the chances of someone leading us astray’. Bypassing the
hidebound legalism of the mullahs, this ‘lay’ Islamic theology
would, he suggests, ‘inspire us to seek equal rights for women, shed
the ideology of violence, learn to respect other religions and other
Islamic sects, and participate fully in the democratic and national
activities of the countries we live in’.
In developing this new and more contextually relevant understanding
of Islam, Faruki argues, the distinction between the spirit and the
letter of the shariah needs to be respected. This is crucial, for he
rightly sees that shariah courts that the mullahs want to set up
would inevitably apply archaic and, in particular, misogynist,
interpretations of the shariah. Speaking out against the mullahs’
insistence that shariah laws ‘as they were practised a thousand
years ago’ be replicated in their totality today, he argues that
‘many Muslims today would rather preserve the true spirit of such
laws’ such as to ensure justice. In support for his plea for a
historically grounded understanding of Islam he quotes with approval
a modernist Muslim intellectual, Reza Arslan, who argues that ‘The
notion that historical context should play no role in the
interpretation of the Koran—that what applied to Muhammad’s
community applies to all Muslim communities for all time – is simply
an untenable position in every sense.''
Writing from Texas, America, a certain Mirza Faisal has also rushed
to my defence. The shariah court campaign, he says, ‘seems to be
devoid of some basic understandings’, the result perhaps of an
absence of what he quaintly calls ‘a reality check’. He insists that
legally sanctioned shariah courts would ‘kill Muslims politically
and move them further into ghettos’. ‘Religious counselling
systems’, he says, are a more sensible option than shariah courts.
In a climate that is increasingly anti-Muslim, he writes, instead of
raking up such ‘controversial issues’ which would not help them,
Muslims must seek to ‘build bridges’ with other communities. ‘The
goal’, he very sensibly suggests, ‘should be to make people better
citizens, to motivate people to move up and have a human agenda
rather than a Muslim agenda’. ‘The goal should be to take up
leadership positions in administration, politics, business,
journalism, sciences etc and be upright Muslims. That is what is
required and not darul qazas’, he tells me.
The most scathing critique of the shariah courts’ proposal comes
from a certain Zafar, an Indian Muslim from Sydney, Australia. ‘I
am unsure as to whether the AIMPLB is being malicious or just plain
stupid here’, he writes, ‘but either way its talent for picking
exactly the wrong issue at exactly the wrong time is reliably
breathtaking’.
‘Have these gentlemen forgotten so soon what their threatening
violence and forcing the government to back down on the Shah Bano
judgement resulted in?’, he asks in genuine anguish. ‘Or are they
simply unconcerned’, he goes on, ‘with the negative impact of their
grandstanding—and it appears to me, but maybe it’s just me—naked
greed for power and influence has on India and its people,
especially on Indian Muslims?’.
Zafar goes so far as to denounce the MPLB as ‘a grotesquely self
aggrandising menace to India and Indian Muslims’. He critiques the
MPLB and similar mullah-dominated groups for seeking to exercise a
hegemonic control over the Muslims, seeking to force the state to
bend to their will and demanding that the state recognise them as
the sole spokesmen of the community. The shariah court campaign, he
says, is all about a quest for ‘money and influence’ for the mullahs
and the graduates of their madrasas, who would, as he puts it
somewhat uncharitably, ‘otherwise be unable to use their medieval
education’. Unable to conceal his disgust with the antics of the
mullahs he says, ‘I mean, how stupid do these clowns think we are?
Why don’t they get a real job like anybody else?’. He even makes so
bold as to assert that if the state caved into the demands of the
mullahs and legally recognised shariah courts he would ‘be tempted
to find the closest Arya Samaj Mandir and make inquiries about
signing up’. ‘It says something that it’s only the actions of the
AIMPLB that make me consider not being a Muslim’, he frankly
confesses in despair, ‘and never those of the organisations that run
shuddhi programs”.
‘Hind mein Islam ko in ki bevakoofi se khatra hai’ (‘Islam is
threatened in India from the idiocy of such people’), Zafar ends his
missive by saying. Not being a Muslim myself in the conventional
sense of the term, I reserve my comments, not wanting to be branded,
once again, as an ‘enemy agent’. But I must confess that I suspect
that many Muslims might well concur with him.