Muslim women seek progress, new leadership

 

NEW DELHI: Muslim women from all over the country, who felt their leadership is not doing enough to extricate them from backwardness, gathered in New Delhi to launch an emancipation campaign.

 

Zakia Jowhar of Action Aid, which organised the meeting, said the movement seeks to address “the long-felt need to have an alternative voice, since the community has no, or questionable, leadership”.

 

Jowhar said the movement is spurred by a nationalist sensibility, emphasised by its name — Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan. It was born out of the realisation that ordinary, secular men and women should take over the  leadership. Jowhar said the movement’s guiding principle is Jiski ladai, uski aguwai (people involved in the struggle should be the ones to lead it).

 

“The campaign seeks to create a national entity with a formal democratic structure and a system of accountability,” said Dr Razia Patel from Pune’s Pragati Vikas, a founding member of the movement. The movement would deliver a big blow to those advocating orthodoxy and conservatism, said Nishat of the National Muslim Women’s Welfare Society. “No religion wants women to progress,” she said.

 

Nishat questioned the authority of the Muslim Personal Law Board — “created under the British” — to speak for, lay down the law, or articulate the rights and duties of Muslims. “If I have problems with my husband, for instance, I will take recourse to Indian law and the Constitution,” she said.

 

“We want a platform, which can counter the hegemony of qazis and menfolk,” said Naz, a participant, “and a space that helps create solidarity with other women, where we can express ourselves freely and feel secure.”

 

The 150-odd women endorsed the vision statement for the andolan. The statement noted the plight of the community as a minority that is “deeply influenced by conservative, religious, and patriarchal forces on the one hand, and survives in extreme poverty and marginalisation on the other.”