A Secular Need Islamic Law and State Governance in Contemporary India (original) (raw)
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This paper aims to posit inquiry on the questions of minority and minoritization and homogenization of Muslims in India through the theoretical lenses of biopolitics and state power. Using theories by Giorgio Agamben (1998; 2005) and Nicos Poulantzas (1975; 1978a; 1978b), this paper aims to identify the problems that the interventions by the secular Indian law and legislative apparatus produce in the process of re-defining the boundaries and constructing a homogenous, Muslim subject. This paper argues that conceptualizing a homogenous Muslim subject in Indian law – especially, in the Personal Law – enables both biopolitics of exclusion and puts the Indian Muslim communities in a direct conflict with the Indian juridical–political apparatus, which aims to regulate them as one ‘body’, disregarding diversity and multiple identities.
The Indian Dimension of An-Na'Im's Islam and the Secular State
papers.ssrn.com
This paper focuses on the chapter on India in An-Na'im's Islam and the secular state. It first sets out the general context of An-Na'im's writing and his specific commitment in Islam and the secular state to distinguish between the secularity of the state, on the one hand, and the basically private realm of shari'a. This forms the basis of An-Na'im's contention that shari'a and state law should be kept separate and that the state is not competent to enforce shari'a. The paper then goes on to examine the basis for secularism in India's experience of British colonialism, and locates its roots in India's encounter with British Protestantism. The discourse of secularism has survived in post-colonial India and become a constitutional commitment, although its theological underpinnings continue to exacerbate ethno-religious conflict. The answer to such conflict must lie outside the domain of the opposition between religion and secularism therefore, and potentially in India's long consciousness of pluralism, including legal pluralism. As an example of the continued vitality of such pluralism the issue of courts and judging in the Muslim law context is taken up, with a focus on some controversial litigation in matters of Muslim personal law. These examples actualize the claim of the paper that An-Na'im's thesis in Islam and secular state may actually not be workable in concrete contexts outside of the theological premises which underpin it.
Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims In India and Pakistan. By Barbara D. Metcalf
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2007
ing that samsara is no different from nirvana metaphysically, we still need to work out its implications ethically. I would recommend that to get the best out of this book a reader should first read an essay and then jump to the relevant section in Magliola's afterword in order to see Magliola's analysis of that piece, as well as his often spirited challenge of the author's blind sights in his/her interpretation of Buddhism and vigorous defense of the Derridean deconstruction project.
Religion and Secularities Reconfiguring Islam in Contemporary India Book Review
Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 2021
This edited collection explores the linkages between religion, civil society, public sphere and the state in contemporary India. The essays, using ethnographic explorations, explore Islamic piety, civic participation and activism, matrilineal practices, personal law, and contestations around sites of worship and commemoration.
South Asia LSE Review: Politics of Islamic Law (V Hamzic)
In The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State, Iza R. Hussin traces a riveting history of Islamic law as it encounters, and is inevitably transformed by, British colonialism in Malaya, Egypt and India. It is a work of unique critical sensibilities, setting the scene for future interdisciplinary research of colonial and postcolonial Islamic law as fruitful analytical categories, finds Vanja Hamzić. The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State. Iza R. Hussin. University of Chicago Press. 2016.
The adjudication of religious personal laws of minority communities in India has been a domain of contestation between competing claims of cultural autonomy, gender justice, and individual rights. The Supreme Court of India has time and again been confronted with the conflict between the secular law and legislation that protects group rights of minorities. While the existing literature has taken note of the attempts by the Indian state and the judiciary at legal-pluralist interventions to secure gender justice within the framework of personal laws based on religion, there has not been a sustained analysis of the discursive construction of constitutional law in dynamic interaction with the secular law and tenets of religion. This paper attempts to address this important gap in the scholarship using a discourse analysis of the judgments of the Supreme Court of India from 1985 until 2015 pertaining to post-divorce maintenance for Muslim women. I examine how the " rights " of Muslim women are framed in a realm of dynamic interaction between legislation premised on community identity, notions of constitutionalism, and personal laws based on religion to argue that the state adopts an interventionist role in a legal-pluralist paradigm; it further uses the specificity of community identity to foreground a vision of social justice.
On one hand, this ‘book of logic ‘n reasoning’ appraises the Islamic faith shaped by the sublimity of Muhammad's preaching in Mecca and the severity of his sermons in Medina, which together make it Janus-faced to bedevil the minds of the Musalmans. That apart, aided by “I’m Ok – You’re Ok”, the path-breaking work of Thomas A. Harris and Roland E Miller’s “Muslim Friends–Their Faith and Feeling”, this work for the first time ever, psycho-analyses the imperatives of the Muslim upbringing that has the potential to turn a faithful and a renegade alike into a fidayēn. On the other, this work, besides appraising the monumental rise and the decadent fall of Hindu intellectualism, analyses how the sanātana dharma came to survive in India, in spite of the combined onslaught of Islam and the Christianity on Hinduism for over a millennium. Also, besides providing a panoramic view of the Indian history, this thought-provoking book appraises the way Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Azad, Ambedkar, Indira Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, Narendra Modi et al made or unmade the post-colonial India. Possibly in a new genre this free eBook is a book for our times. Contents Preface of Strife Chapters 1. Advent of Dharma 2. God’s quid pro Quo 3. Pyramids of Wisdom 4. Ascent to Descent 5. The Zero People 6. Coming of the Christ 7. Legacy of Prophecy 8. War of Words 9. Czar of Medina 10. Angels of War 11. Privates of ‘the God’ 12. Playing to the Gallery 13. Perils of History 14. Pitfalls of Faith 15. Blinkers of Belief 16. Shackles of Sharia 17. Anatomy of Islam 18. Fight for the Souls 19. India in Coma 20. Double Jeopardy 21. Paradise of Parasites 22. The Number Game 23. Winds of Change 24. Ant Grows Wings 25. Constitutional Amnesia 26. The Stymied State 27. The Wages of God 28. Delusions of Grandeur 29. Ways of the Bigots 30. The Rift Within 31. The Way Around 32. The Hindu Rebound 33. Italian Interregnum 34. Rama Rajya 35. Wait for the Savant
Working Paper Series of the HCAS "Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities", 2019
In this paper, we show how this plural legal landscape is negotiated by litigants, especially women, and thereby illustrate the procedural interplay between civil and religious courts through this adjudication process. The ethnography of adjudication at the Darul-Qaza situated in a large Muslim neighbourhood in Kanpur and the institution’s intersections with the societal (We mean the tribunals that function at the neighbourhood or community level) secular courts show how Muslim personal law functions. In this paper, we identify both the links between the Darul-Qaza and civil courts, and the processes of evidence making and legal reasoning that are integral to this interlegality. We argue that the issue of personal law should be understood within the post-colonial legal structure of India and with a good understanding of the processes through which disputes in the delicate area of family, affect and kinship are addressed and resolved. The above case shows how resolution occurs in a family dispute when plural institutional mechanisms are at work. This paper explores the adjudication process at a Darul-Qaza to understand how religion-based family laws get constituted as litigants seek both religious counsel and civil authority.