ABSTRACT
This chapter locates the violence of Muslim personal law on the everyday of Muslim women from Mumbai. Muslim personal law effects Muslim women’s marital, sexual, social and reproductive choices, and mobility heavily and produces her as poor, objectified, and a subject of labour for her localised and identity-based community, which is interpreted as collective honour that a political minority is sensitively invested in. As Muslim subalterns, who shoulder the burden of religious conservatism imbued as minority honour, Muslim women are moreover systemically located at the borderland of communities, at the receiving end of communal tension typically aimed at Muslim ghettos that are deliberately created to target the vulnerable Muslim honour and therefore to recreate it and keep the tension of Muslim personal law active. Muslim women suffer meanwhile from both the conservative personal law and the rioting that objectify them, as its forbearers. While intellectuals such as Dalwai and Engineer have struggled for women’s freedom from Muslim patriarchy, Hindu right-wing groups have viewed the eradication of Muslim personal law as ways to attack Muslim honour, by using Muslim women’s victimhood as weapons against it. Muslim feminist activists from Mumbai such as Hasina Khan, on the other hand, as vanguards of both Muslim community rights as well as champions of Muslim women, emerging from organizations such as Awaze-Niswaan, have attempted to bridge the gap between community and feminist needs. My chapter seeks to locate some of Hasina Khan’s views in the discussions surrounding the need for Islamic feminism in Mumbai within the context of violence faced by Muslim women on the boundary between Muslim and Hindu society.
