MUMBAI, INDIA -- On the bustling streets of Mumbai, journalist and activist Sameera Khan is an ordinary face in the cosmopolitan landscape and a contributing member of the city’s globally competitive workforce. Yet in the villages of India, she might find herself lacking the rights she enjoys here. Khan is a Muslim Indian woman.

The Indian legal system plays a balancing act. On the one hand, the world’s largest democracy has maintained a legal system that is secular. On the other, for a nation of millions of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, when it comes to the issue of family law, different religious groups have had a degree of autonomy. But the way justice is administered in the Muslim familial legal system is treating women unfairly, according to some Muslim women activists. And in Mumbai, and elsewhere in India, some of them are trying to change that.

Until the mid-1980s, a Muslim woman did not have the right to maintenance (similar to alimony) in a divorce. When the Supreme Court granted Muslim women that right, the Indian government passed a law yielding more autonomy to Muslim family law, making the Supreme Court decision weaker. In villages around India, Muslim men have the right to marry more than one woman, said Khan, and that according to Islamic law a husband can divorce his wife just by saying divorce three times. The wife, however, does not have similar rights.

This, Khan believes, is what marginalizes Muslim women in a state that is ostensibly a secular democracy. But she thinks that Muslim women can spark a change.

Khan’s current work involves the study of the Indian public space and how it affects women, and she looks to the future optimistically as there are Muslim women’s groups in Mumbai that want to challenge this inequality. Hasina Khan is the coordinator of Aawaaz-e-Niswaan (Voice of the Women) and her group strives to make polygamy illegal in India. Noorjehan Safia Niaz of the Women’s Research and Action Group (WRAG) also works to secure more rights for women in India’s Muslim family law. In 2005, Niaz reportedly protested loudly against the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which had stated that Muslim law made the wife subservient to her husband.

“Islam gives more rights to women than any other religion,” said Sona Khan, a Muslim women’s rights attorney in Delhi. “But politically, Islam has dropped gender protection rights.” Khan was an attorney for Shah Bano, whose mid-1980s Indian Supreme Court case ended in a ruling that a Muslim woman in a divorce could be granted maintenance, or alimony, which was different from the Muslim law. Today, Muslim communities can still control how divorces are administered.

Sona Khan dismisses the radical Muslim leaders throughout the world who want to cut back on women’s rights as “political vendors.” The stories people in the West hear about women being punished unfairly in the Muslim world is not consistent with the teachings of the Koran. These political regimes, she said, are “man-made.”

Even though Khan, the attorney, considers herself a practicing Muslim, she believes that India’s democracy is weakened by what she calls “regionalism.” Religious pluralism is something that benefits the nation, but nevertheless, it needs a universal legal system, she believes.

“[Muslims] can’t run a parallel system of the administration of justice,” she said.

In the future, she said, she would like to work on cases in Indian courts that would challenge Islamic clerics’ ability to dictate how Muslim communities govern themselves.

Meanwhile, Sameera Khan laments that Muslim women in India have long been stuck in a political bind. During British occupation, she said, Muslims were fighting the mighty colonial force, so women who may have felt slighted by inequality were discouraged from calling for change in their community so that the independence movement would not be splintered. Today, she finds Muslims in a similar situation. In India, Muslims are the largest minority religion, and the opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) continues to promote a political platform that stands against the “appeasement” of the Muslim minority. In March 2006, BJP leader L.K. Advani announced that he would embark on a yatra—or a journey throughout the country—the following month in order to raise Hindu political consciousness in the wake of the terrorist bombings in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, believed to be carried out by Muslim extremists. Advani said that he wanted the theme of his campaign to be “justice for all, appeasement for none.”

And on the world stage, she believes that Muslims feel confronted by Europe and by the United States. Thus, Muslim women feel that their religion is fighting for equality with other religions, so now is not the time to rock the proverbial boat. “When do we fight for our rights?” she asked rhetorically. “The woman’s question is to be answered later.”

According to her own social research in Mumbai, public space is built to the advantage of Indian men in general. While women of all religions in India have progress to be made, she feels that she is in a position of double jeopardy.

“It’s tough being Muslim,” said Khan. “It’s even tougher to be a Muslim woman.”