Backpage

ONE of the more enduring images in our popular imagination is of the Muslim woman – invariably portrayed as poor, illiterate, ignorant and powerless – enjoying little autonomy as an individual. Victim of an ‘obscurantist’ religion (Islam) she is seen as trapped in multiple marriage and purdah, constantly fearful of the Damocles sword of triple talaq. And no matter how often scholars point out the falsity of this image, popular discourse continues to be hegemonised by such stereotypes.

It thus is little surprise that the squabble over the recently released religion tables from the 2001 Census remains suffused with misconceptions about the status of Muslim women in India and more generally about the relationship between gender and Islam. We continue to believe assertions relating higher growth rates of Indian Muslims to their uncontrolled fertility. Why, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we even link immigration from Bangladesh to Muslim demography.

As Alaka Basu in a recent contribution to the EPW points out, higher population growth rates could equally be a function of declining death rates and infant mortality rates. Clearly, it is much too discomfiting to admit that Bangladesh, long described as a ‘basket case’, may have made significant progress on different social indicators – birth rates, death rates, school enrolment, labour force participation. How else can we explain the popularity of our North East as an eventual destination! Worse, what then happens to our campaign against the Muslim hordes taking over Hindu India or for ramming through a Uniform Civil Code.

Given the centrality that the status of the Muslim woman occupies in our discourse, it would help if some of our ideologues read Unequal Citizens by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon (OUP, 2004), the first ever national survey of 10,000 Muslim and Hindu women in India covering a range of issues from education, work, socio-economic status, marriage, decision- making, autonomy, mobility, domestic violence, access to welfare and political participation.

Not only does this study challenge the commonplace view treating Muslims and Muslim women as a monolithic category and consequently generalizations about what in reality is a highly differentiated and heterogeneous community, it helps displace the mistaken and pernicious understanding of an all-pervasive Islam and shariah as the determining factor in Muslim life and behaviour. Rarely is it realized that the obsessive preoccupation with personal law only contributes to the continuing appeasement of religious, mainly male, leaders as the sole arbiters of Muslim fate, with women viewed essentially as wards of their community.

There is little doubt that a substantial majority of Muslim women are poor, disadvantaged and politically marginalized. But, instead of tracing all this to religion, Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon deploy a more complex framing of class, caste, community and region, this while giving due weightage to their location as a minority. Focusing on region, for instance, helps us understand the relatively better status of Muslim communities (and women) in our South and West, not only with respect to living standards, but equally education and in matters of demography. The last in particular is buttressed by Census data, revealing that Muslim girls’ school enrolment figures compare favourably with their Hindu counterparts not just in Kerala but Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. Recent studies in Andhra Pradesh show that in predominantly Muslim talukas, girls vastly outnumber boys in government primary schools.

Equally significant is the book’s stress on low education, opportunity, mobility and domestic responsibility rather than purdah or religious conservatism as explanatory factors for Muslim women’s work status. Clearly, the authors foreground secular discourses of development and empowerment in their search for constructive affirmative action. Paradoxically, however, their data also suggests relatively low community variations in decision-making, mobility and access to public spaces, underscoring the limited autonomy and control most Muslim women have over their lives.

It is not their argument that religion and personal law do not matter. In this, they are probably drawing on the amazing documentation made available by Women Under Muslim Law, a global network analyzing variations in laws governing marriage, divorce, adoption and property rights in different countries, whether governed by shariah or secular law. It is paradoxical that many Muslim majority countries seem more willing to reform personal law in a gender-just direction than secular dispensations such as ours, reflective of the distortions that have crept into our politics.

Overall, surveys such as this one, as also an analysis of the data thrown up by Census 2001, should help move our policy and public discourse beyond the stereotypes.

Harsh Sethi