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Indian Muslim Women’s Struggles for Equality, Justice and Empowerment
Workshop
on
'Indian Muslim Women’s Struggles for Equality, Justice and Empowerment'
(21-23 May 2011)
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As numerous reports have shown, Muslims are among the most deprived and marginalised communities in India. Muslim women are triply marginalised: as Muslims, as women and as members of a community that, taken as a whole, is economically disadvantaged. If the state and the ‘mainstream’ media can be accused of being largely indifferent to the question of Muslim ‘backwardness’, Muslim ‘leaders’—political and religious—can rightly be accused of being indifferent to the specific problems of Muslim women that have, in part, to do with internal hierarchies often legitimised in the name of Islam. The subordination of Muslim women owes to a host of factors, including the social, economic, political and educational marginalisation of the Muslim community as a whole, as well as the indifference of agencies of the state as well as Muslim ‘leaders’ to the question of Muslim women’s subordination and the need for their substantive empowerment.
Debates about Muslims in contemporary India—and globally as well—generally focus on issues related to Muslim religious beliefs and identity. Although these questions are indeed pertinent, the framework of these debates is extremely limited, leaving out substantive issues of economic, educational, social and political marginality, without which the conditions of the community, including Muslim women, can hardly be properly understood. These debates routinely raise issues related to the conditions of Muslim women, linking their ‘backwardness’ simply to competing discourses about the normative status of women in Islam. Clearly, this is a very skewed and limited perspective.
By locating Muslim women’s status and conditions solely within a religious framework, the material causes for their overall ‘backwardness’, in which the state and wider society are also deeply implicated, is conveniently sidestepped. Critics routinely argue that the ‘backwardness’ of Muslim women owes principally to Islamic scriptural prescriptions that, they allege, are inherently misogynist and patriarchal, while Muslim apologists insist that the contrary is true: that Islam provides women with all the rights they ‘need’, and that only if Muslims were to truly follow the prescriptions of Islam in the ‘right’ manner, the problems of Muslim women could easily be solved. But as to what constitutes Islamic normativity, including on issues related to gender, continues to be hotly debated among Muslims themselves. There being no church in Islam that can lay down doctrine for all Muslims to follow, there is a multiplicity of voices, each claiming to solely represent the ‘authentic’ Islam, offering diverse, indeed conflicting interpretations of precisely what Islam has to say about relations between the genders and about the status of Muslim women. On the one hand are a range of patriarchal voices that clearly subordinate Muslim women to men and narrowly circumscribe their social roles, all in the name of Islam, while, on the other hand, are a number of Muslim scholars and activists who insist that Islam stands for full equality for Muslim women, in the process articulating what has been called an Islamic feminist vision.
The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, is hosting a two-day workshop on the 21st –23rd of May, 2011, to bring together activists and scholars working on issues related to Muslim women’s struggles for equality and justice and for their economic, educational, social and political empowerment. The aim of the workshop is to discuss ongoing initiatives and struggles, locate crucial issues that need to be foregrounded to galvanise such struggles and promote networking between activists and scholars working on these issues who are located in different parts of the country. The discussions would focus on the following issues:
1. Personal narratives: How participants’ interest in the issue of Muslim women’s subordination and the need for the empowerment evolved, and details of the initiatives they have been engaged in.
2. Reflections on the Muslim religious and political leadership, the Muslim and the ‘mainstream’ media, agencies of the state, political parties, NGOs, and ‘secular’ women’s groups and movements to issues of Muslim women’s marginality and the quest for their social, economic and educational advancement.
3. The need to critique and challenge patriarchal understandings of Islam, and to promote alternate Islamic discourses based on gender equality and justice, and the prospects as well as hurdles in the path of evolving such alternate discourses. Related to this is the issue of the limits of a single frame of reference—whether based on Islamic or secular human rights discourse—to articulate the agenda of Muslim women’s empowerment, and the need for synergy between Islamic and secular human rights or Constitutional frames of reference.
4. The task of foregrounding Muslim women’s concerns and issues at the policy-making level, in the media and in the agenda of Muslim organisations.
5. The task of linking Muslim women’s initiatives and struggles for justice and equality within the broader Muslim community to ongoing efforts to justice and empowerment for Muslims as a whole in the wider context of debates about democracy and social justice. This would include practical suggestions as to what can be done in this regard.
6. Linking Muslim women’s struggles for justice and equality to the need for reforms in the current regime of Muslim Personal Law, and how this task can be furthered with the help of experiences of reforms in personal law statutes in several Muslim countries.
7.A critique of dominant notions of multiculturalism and minority rights that pay scant attention to internal hierarchies within marginalised communities (i.e. minorities within minorities), based on class, caste and gender, and the possibilities of linking Muslim women’s struggles to those of other struggles within the broader Muslim community, such as that of Dalit and OBC Muslims.
Participants are expected to prepare detailed papers focussing on one or more of these six broad issues and to send them to the organisers by the 1st of May, 2002. We hope to publish these papers as a volume. Please email your papers to Yoginder Sikand at ysikand@gmail.com
The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, will cover the cost of your travel by train (AC Two Tier) and accommodation (from 21st to 23rd May, 2010)
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