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.”

| TrackBacks (0)

Indians join in an impromtu dance during the flag lowering ceremony at the border with Pakistan. (Aili McConnon)

After putting our bags down in our hotel in Amristar and feeling rested from a five-hour train ride from Delhi, our group drove to Wagah to observe the ceremonial closing of the border with Pakistan.

In the last several years, the border between these two rival nations has been opened up; transnational train service was launched this year and people pass through the border crossing here on a daily basis.

On Sunday, the gathering of several thousand Indians to watch soldiers from both countries lower their respective flags, was a moment of celebration. The ceremony has become more of a tourist attraction in recent years rather an epicenter of international hostility.

Nirmal Singh Bishad drew cheers from the crowd when he ran back and forth down the road leading to the border with an Indian flag larger than his adolescent body. But his act of joyous patriotism was not an act of aggression toward Pakistan, he insisted.

“They are our friends,” he said, “not our enemies.”

As the Indian troops prepared to approach the gate, the crowd chanted “Hindustan Zindabad,” which in Hindi means, “Long live India.” The Pakistani crowd just yards away chanted in Urdu, “Pakistan Zindabad,” or “Long Live Pakistan.”

Men danced in the path leading up to the border to Indian music before the flags were pulled down just before sunset. The Indian troops stomped with such ferocity and marched with such exaggerated exuberance it drew chuckles from the crowd.

“It is fake aggression,” Delhi-based journalist Mannika Chopra said in reference to the stern faces the Indian troops give to their Pakistani counterparts. “It’s a tourist thing.”

The arbitrary border between the two countries was designed by the same colonial force, Britain, which exploited the subcontinent for its resources. The two countries inherited these borders when they gained independence from Britain in August 1947. The riots that resulted from partition ended in nearly 2 million deaths in this part in India.

While many people on both sides of the border today came to celebrate their countries rather than to show aggression toward one another, Chopra explained that there are deeper tensions. Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have both worked to open up this border due to the post-9/11 political climate and international pressure, but both have to appease important constituents to maintain their political power. Musharaf must play to the interests of Islamic extremists and Singh must recognize the interests of right wing, Hindu nationalists.

That is why there are two faces of the ceremony on the border. For the Indian tourists coming from as far away as the capital of New Delhi and the southern city of Chennai, the meeting of green clad Indian soldiers with black clad Pakistani soldiers is a source of both entertainment and national pride. But with India’s new nuclear deal with the United States there is the possibility for a rise in tension that would give the soldiers seemingly acted hostile nature a little bit of sincerity.

"It’s bizarre,” Chopra said.

| TrackBacks (0)

In every generation Jews are commanded to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt in ways that are relevant to their lives. Standing in that tradition, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum used the Biblical story to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, New York’s gay, lesbian and transgender congregation.

“In every generation we are required to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt,” she said during a recent Friday night service marking the anniversary at the Church of the Holy Apostles at 296 9th Avenue in Chelsea. “Telling this story is essential to our survival as a people.”

Kleinbaum stood before the congregation with two gay pride flags and an Israeli flag behind her. She explained how the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt is related to this congregation remembering the struggle for a homosexual and Jewish identity.

“Coming out,” she said in reference to being openly homosexual, “is a great act of liberation.”

In 1973, she said, an Indian Jew named Jacob Gubbay put a small classified ad in the Village Voice asking for gay Jews who were not welcome at other New York congregations to come together for a Shabbat service at the Chelsea church were the congregation still meets, along with its smaller West Village location. She called this ad a small step towards liberation.

“The number of people who say they were at that service far exceeds the 10 people I know who where there,” she said as the congregation chuckled.

While the gay rights movement was growing in New York, in the fall of 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Those two events sparked many gay Jews to become more involved in Judaism.

Kleinbaum asked people who joined the gay congregation in 1973 to stand, and only a few of the nearly 100 people in the congregation stood up. She moved on to1974, 1975 and so forth, going through all 33 years that have passed. When she said 2006, the last people seated came to their feet.

Recalling the exodus from Egypt every year, Kleinbaum said, was important because it would inspire Jews to address the struggle of all people who were oppressed. While this congregation has grown, some of its leadership still faces resistance for forming a community that is deeply Jewish and openly homosexual. One rabbi at the congregation, Rabbi Ayelet Cohen was censured in 2005 by the Conservative Jewish movement, to which she belongs, for conducting gay marriages and for breaking other procedural rules of Rabbinical Assembly. In 2004, she told the New York Times that she feared legal consequences for performing such ceremonies in the state.

But the story of the exodus was also meant to inspire the congregation to remember those in the community who have died of AIDS and to inspire them to volunteer at the church’s soup kitchen, the second largest in the nation.

“It’s criminal that this is still necessary in 2006,” she said in reference to the city’s homeless problem.

| TrackBacks (0)