ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2005, newspapers in India picked up the story of the alleged rape by her father-in-law of a poor Muslim woman named Imrana in an obscure village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.1 On the night of 3 June 2005, according to an account given in one of India’s most respected Englishlanguage weeklies, Imrana, a woman in her late 20s, mother of five children, was raped by her father-in-law, Mohamed Ali, while her husband was away from home. He ‘crept into her bed with a country revolver, threatening to kill her and the children sleeping by her side if she screamed’. According to the same account, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law begged her to say nothing, but when she turned to her natal kin, they took action. Her four brothers and a brother-in-law arrived enraged and elicited a confession from the guilty party (Reddy 2005). Imrana’s home was a tiny airless shack, a mud floor below, swarms of flies
and a dangling electric wire above. She was illiterate, like most Muslim women. She had been married at age thirteen in violation of criminal law, an offence apparently that passed unnoticed. Noor Ilahi, her husband, worked part-time in a brick kiln and pulled a rickshaw for a living. They lived with her in-laws, badly in debt. There may have been an ongoing family feud over whether the parents, in opposition to Imrana and Noor Ilahi, would sell off the house (Islamicvillage 2005). When it comes to Muslim women, most observers in India have assumed that their problems are owed to the peculiarities of Islamic injunctions impacting women, specifically the easy divorce of the ‘triple talaq’ and polygamy. An important country-wide survey conducted in 2002 demonstrated instead that most of the issues that are taken to be about Islam and women turn far more often on poverty and discrimination (Hasan and Menon 2004). Imrana’s story is one that could have happened among poor people of any religious background in South Asia facing acute tensions between natal and marital families, struggling perhaps for some kind of economic or political gain, and fighting, whether symbolically or literally, over women’s bodies. As Shabana Azmi, the celebrated film star and social activist of Muslim background wrote, speaking against both the panchayat (caste council) and the fatwa, ‘It could be Imrana, Indira or Irene, the manifestations could be varied, but the real malaise is that violence against
women – physical, emotional and verbal – has the tacit approval of society’ (Azmi 2005). In Imrana’s case, this private matter soon became a public one; and it became one largely argued in relation to Islam. What would be the grist of the commentary about Imrana were two
interventions by two different local entities produced within days of the event. The first apparently was by ‘the customary caste panchayat’, in this case all available men of the Muslim Ansari community (Reddy 2005), which, like caste panchayats across religious boundaries, serves to adjudicate internal disputes and community social relations. Imrana, they declared, was no longer the wife of Noor Ilahi but rather the wife of Mohamed Ali, her fatherin-law, the alleged rapist. According to some reports, he was to have his face blackened and be subjected to other humiliations. Second, the editor of a local newspaper posed a question to an Islamic
scholar associated with the prestigious nearby seminary, the Darul Uloom at Deoband, who produced a document, a fatwa or advisory judicial opinion, concurring that rape on the part of a father-in-law invalidated an existing marriage, but that, pace the panchayat ruling, it did not require the woman to become her father-in-law’s wife. The fact that this episode took place near Deoband and that a Deobandi scholar was widely quoted, no doubt contributed to the speed with which reports and discussion spread. The extent of interest in the event is suggested by a comment made by the
anthropologist, Sylvia Vatuk, who returned to the United States in early 2006 from field work on law and Muslim women in Andhra Pradesh, at the other end of the country from Imrana’s home. She reported that whenever she told people in India what her research subject was, they immediately wanted to discuss ‘Imrana’ (Vatuk 2006). Even the New York Times featured an essay by the celebrated and controversial novelist Salman Rushdie. His commentary, like many others, focused in particular on ‘Islamic’ legal responses to the episode that seemed to confirm a theme in the global discourse on Islam that identified male aggressiveness, female helplessness, misogyny, and the tyranny of Islamic law and its spokesmen as salient and universal characteristics. This theme has a significant local dimension in the case of India where
the Muslim population of roughly 14 per cent – the largest minority population anywhere at some 140,000,000 – has both served as a symbol for Hindu nationalist majoritarianism and been the target of violence and discrimination.2 In this pervasive image of Muslims, the imagined plight of Muslim women is particularly charged. That the media leapt to highlight a story like this, even stimulate it by such means as a reporter’s solicitation of the fatwa, is not surprising. Imrana’s story serves in part to demonstrate the power of the negat-
ive images with which Muslim Indians live. But it also reveals salient characteristics about other dimensions of contemporary Indian life as well. These include the practices of multiple sites of legal and moral guidance and adjudication, the vibrancy of India’s civil society, and – perhaps most
surprisingly in light of the pervasiveness of negative stereotypes to the contrary – the existence of creative ferment among some Indian Muslims about Islam itself. That Islamic debate, both its scope and the content of discussion, provide an important corrective to the simple stereotype of a monolithic and powerful standard of proper Islam. Of even greater importance for Imrana herself was the fact that she could chose to ignore both panchayat and Islamic counsel and seek redress in the secular courts.
