- Sharia laws perpetuate gender inequalities, particularly in areas of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody, often disadvantaging women.
- Sharia incorporates regressive practices such as triple talaq, polygamy, and female genital mutilation, which are rooted in medieval customs and man-made hadiths.
- The implementation of Sharia laws often conflicts with modern human rights standards, leading to the marginalization and disenfranchisement of Muslim women.
- Sharia laws are used to control and limit the freedoms of women, including restrictions on freedom of expression, dress codes, and the punishment of apostasy.
- Despite the profound impact on women’s lives, Sharia laws have remained largely unchanged for centuries, highlighting the urgent need for a modern reinterpretation to align with contemporary values and democratic principles.
A Personal Tale of Injustice
I am a Kashmiri Muslim woman, and I’m a victim of Sharia laws, as are my mother and my sister.
Generally, Muslims believe that Sharia laws are just [1] and offer protection within the ummah community. However, a few objective Muslims, who take a rational view of Sharia (largely derived from hearsay hadiths), strive to correct this historical injustice. Ironically, even if we assume that Sharia laws, developed and codified by male ulema post-Abbasids and endorsed by successive caliphs, are followed to the letter, male Muslim relatives often find ways to manipulate these laws for their own greed and power. This highlights the ultimate irony: Despite their supposedly strict adherence to the Prophet’s instructions, they end up violating the very principles they claim to uphold.
[…] my mother had the audacity to protest when my paternal grandfather tried to molest my sister. In response, my father rewarded her with the instant triple talaq.
Triple talaq (pronunciation of the word talaq thrice) renders a marriage of decades dissolved, and in my mother’s case, that is what happened. It was a huge injustice, especially since she had two young daughters and no source of income. The reason for the divorce was even more shocking—my mother had the audacity to protest when my paternal grandfather tried to molest my sister. In response, my father rewarded her with the instant triple talaq. She had to take sanctuary in our maternal grandfather’s home, at the mercy of her four brothers, who took up our responsibility.
It didn’t stop there; the informal mohalla (neighborhood) committee, Kashmir’s version of sharia courts, blamed my mother for washing the family’s dirty laundry in public and urged her to reconcile with my father on the condition of retracting her allegations. My maternal family stood their ground, and we sisters embarked on a challenging path of making our careers with no alimony or maintenance money coming in for the next two decades. Only after we two sisters became self-made professionals, she a physician and I, an educationist and writer, did our mother’s world become right again.
But the travesty of injustice did not end there. We sisters managed to reunite our parents after 20 years and were there for our father, who had abandoned us. Nursing him through his stage 4 leukemia and eventual death, one more truth of Sharia laws was revealed to us. Since we sisters do not have a male sibling, our paternal male relatives used every playbook of Sharia laws to deprive us of our father’s inheritance. In my case, Sharia laws further dealt blows after my husband Arshid Malik’s death at age 40 due to a cardiac arrest. According to Sharia laws (the Indian subcontinent follows the Hanafi interpretations), I am automatically deprived of my husband’s inheritance, along with my minor son, since my father-in-law was alive at the time.
So, I wait for justice as my only child grows into an adult and is starting to understand how not just Sharia laws but the entire Islamic culture, in Kashmir as well as across India, deprives Muslim women of their rights, violates their bodies, their minds, their souls and leaves them disempowered of logic, rationality and the truth.
Seeking Secular Rights for Ex-Muslims
Amidst all of this, I read that a woman from Kerala of Muslim heritage, Safiya PM, had filed a petition [2] in the Supreme Court of India challenging the application of Sharia law to those who are born into Islam but identify as nonbelievers. The case is scheduled for a hearing on July 12, 2024.
[…]the real question is how a religion claiming to be about equality deviates so much from its core message.
Safiya’s plea seeks a declaration that nonbeliever Muslims should be governed by secular laws, specifically the Indian Succession Act of 1925, in matters of intestate and testamentary succession. She contends that individuals who do not wish to be governed by the Muslim Personal Law must have the option to be governed by the country’s secular law. The case is one of its kind, and Safiya is not just fighting for herself and her child but also for women like my sister, my mother, and me. The ramifications of this verdict will affect men and women who have left the fold of Islam (apostates) or are lapsed Muslims or dissenters.
Safiya is inadvertently fighting for believing Muslim women who are discriminated against and marginalized by the misogynistic Sharia laws. However, the real question is how a religion claiming to be about equality deviates so much from its core message. Religious scholars say the word ‘sharia’ appears only three times in the Quran, and it stands for the body of Islamic law. The Quran does not provide day-to-day guidelines, so the Sharia laws we have today were compiled two centuries after the Prophet’s death. These laws were drawn from ten different sources, including the Quran, the Prophet’s examples, consensus, reasoning, old laws, local customs, and public interest.[3]
Marriage, Divorce, and Inheritance under Sharia
Sharia laws are traditionally interpreted by religious scholars and apply primarily to Muslims. They cover marriage, divorce, inheritance, and criminal offenses and are administered by Sharia in conjunction with state courts. Sharia laws for inheritance follow specific rules based on gender and family relationships, and shares are distributed among heirs according to Islamic guidelines. Sharia courts often run parallel to secular state courts, raising challenges for pluralism and secularism. Direct criticism of Sharia laws usually revolves around concerns for human rights, gender equality, and adaptability to modern societal norms, especially regarding harsh punishments for crimes.
Sharia laws perpetuate gender inequalities regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, and the custody of children.
In the same vein, Sharia laws perpetuate gender inequalities regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, and the custody of children. Add to that cultural and social notions from medieval times tied up with man-made hadiths, and we get female genital mutilation (FGM), mandatory veiling, honor killings, child marriage, and many other regressive practices and norms. Even freedom of expression in Islam is restricted, and there is censorship if anyone steps over the line, be it from Muslim heritage or non-Muslims. Agnosticism is frowned upon and termed heresy, while atheism is not tolerated, and apostates are killed or maimed for expressing their disbelief openly. Criticism of the Prophet in any medium is met with death threats often carried out, like the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the film director Theo van Gogh’s stabbing case in point.
Sharia laws are often seen as incompatible with democracy and modernity and are considered rigid and outdated. An Islamic Renaissance (Muslim Enlightenment) is needed to address this tension between traditional Islamic principles and modern democratic values. Many of the Sharia laws are man-made and conflict with national laws. Scholarly interpretations should be open to debate and scrutiny.
Hasan Mahmud’s book ‘How Shari-ism Hijacked Islam: The Problem, Prognosis, and Prescription’ is an impressive effort by the author, who delves deeply into Sharia literature from the most authentic Islamic sources and dissects it in a scholarly way to support his assertion that man-made sharia law is fundamentally flawed. [4] His book explores various aspects of Sharia law, including its definition, sources, and internal contradictions. It also discusses specific issues such as triple talaq, killing apostates, punishing rape victims, women’s rights in Islam, female genital mutilation, polygamy, wife beating, and slavery – regressive practices justified due to local customs, old laws, obsolete scriptures, hearsay and the presumption of continuity of traditions.
A New Vision for Islamic Law
During a 90-minute interview with state-owned Rotana TV on April 27, 2021, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) discussed the need for a contemporary interpretation [5] of the Quran. He suggested focusing the constitution and laws on the Quran and reducing the influence of many hadiths. The Crown Prince also emphasized moderation in applying Islamic laws and challenged the ideology of Wahhabism. MbS is advocating for a reform of Islam, moving away from Wahhabism. His proposed reforms include changing punishments for various offenses. This places him alongside Muslim intellectuals who have sought to modernize Islam despite facing persecution and even death for their views.
The approach of emphasizing adherence to Quranic regulations and well-established hadiths while scrutinizing the reliability of lesser-known ones would result in only 10% of hadiths being considered valid, aligning closely with the Quran. As a result, certain harsh punishments like stoning and amputation could be abolished, along with laws regarding apostasy and homosexuality. This marks a departure from Wahhabi ideology, favoring a more direct interpretation of Islamic texts over traditional schools of thought and religious scholars. Here, we have the custodian of the two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, akin to the Pope in Christianity, making this statement!
This is like saying that Saudi Arabia is opting for Koranism, a current of thought that rejects the authority of the hadiths and that supports the re-actualization of interpretations as a function of time, knowledge, and culture. This approach could challenge radical political Islam such as Wahhabism, Salafism, and the Deobandi model advocated by some groups in India by emphasizing a more contextual and culturally integrated form of Islam, which could help Indian Muslims reconcile with the uncomfortable historical impact of their faith on the Indian subcontinent.
The Ulema-State Symbiosis
Professor Ahmet T. Kuru of San Diego University, in his book ‘Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison’ [6], argues that the problems of the Muslim world are linked to the “ulema-state alliance” developed in the eleventh century. He suggests mutual benefits, a kind of I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine characterized the alliance between the ulema (body of Islamic scholars) and the state. The state provided patronage to the ulema, offering resources and protection, while the ulema, in turn, legitimized the authority of the ruling elite through religious validation. This symbiotic relationship bolstered the political and religious infrastructure of the medieval Islamic world.
[…] the problems of the Muslim world are linked to the “ulema-state alliance” developed in the eleventh century….a kind of I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine characterized the alliance between the ulema (body of Islamic scholars) and the state.
This symbiotic relationship was male-dominated and did not bode well for the Muslim women it ultimately targeted and caged. With misogyny rampant in medieval times, the outcome of the man-made Sharia laws based on so much hearsay was what we have today in the form of India’s Shariat Act of 1937, a mere four-page document that has never been changed or reformed even after seven decades of independence. The ulema-state alliance had profound implications for medieval Islamic society, as well. It solidified the authority of both religious and political institutions, shaping the legal, ethical, and social fabric of the Muslim community and creating barriers to its reform or change by giving it divine status.
The codified hadith served as a source of guidance and governance, influencing various aspects of everyday life for centuries. The enduring legacy of the ulema-state alliance echoes through the centuries, profoundly influencing Islamic scholarship, which doesn’t touch taboo topics, governance based on religious principles rather than humanistic, and societal norms, which are outdated. Professor Kuru also elaborates that this alliance prevented the emergence of an independent intelligentsia and marginalized the bourgeoisie in the Islamic state. Meanwhile, the separation of the clergy and state in Western Europe resulted in its development by empowering the two classes.
Professor Kuru emphasizes the role of ulema in exacerbating problems in the Muslim world due to their promotion of violent, anti-democratic, and regressive ideas. He views the “ulema-state alliance” as the stumbling block to progress as the ulema legitimizes authoritarian rule, which contributes to violence and underdevelopment.
Safiya’s Case: Ray of Hope for Islamic Renaissance
Safiya PM’s case is not merely a legal battle but a symbol of the broader quest for an Islamic Renaissance, where the re-examination of Sharia laws could lead to a more inclusive, equitable, and just society. The challenge lies in reconciling the rich spiritual heritage of Islam with the demands of modernity, ensuring that its teachings promote not just ritualistic adherence but also the welfare and dignity of all individuals, regardless of our beliefs. This path forward requires courage, scholarly rigor, and a commitment to human rights, promising a future where Islamic principles and contemporary values coexist harmoniously, a formidable aspiration but doable in my humble opinion, especially in a resurgent Bharat.
Citations
[1] The burden of reform and why we do it – SEDAA – Our Voices; http://www.sedaa.org/2017/10/the-burden-of-reform-and-why-we-do-it/
[2] Kerala Muslim woman is on a mission against Shariat Law. It’s a do-or-die inheritance battle (theprint.in); https://theprint.in/feature/kerala-muslim-woman-is-on-a-mission-against-shariat-law-its-a-do-or-die-inheritance-battle/2065026/
[3] Tarek Fatah, “Chasing the Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State,” (2008): p -249.
[4] Hasan Mahmud, “How Sharia-ism Hijacked Islam: The Problem, Prognosis, and Prescription” (2017)
[5] Saudi reforms are softening Islam’s role, but critics warn the kingdom will still take a hard line against dissent (theconversation.com); https://theconversation.com/saudi-reforms-are-softening-islams-role-but-critics-warn-the-kingdom-will-still-take-a-hard-line-against-dissent-210537
[6] Ahmet T. Kuru, “Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison” (2019)