The Indian Dimension of An-Na'Im's Islam and the Secular State (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.
Secularism, the State and Muslim Personal Law
Economic and Political Weekly, 2020
Review article of Katherine Lemons, "Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism" and Julia Stephens, "Governing Islam: Law, Empire and Secularism in South Asia."
Indian Secularism and Muslim Personal Law: The Story of Model Nikahnama
Social Difference Online , 2011
This paper brings into focus the recent initiatives to address Muslim women’s disadvantaged position in marriage through the formulation of a “model nikahnama” or an equitable marriage contract. Debates about Muslim personal law have become central to framing the contentious relationship between Indian secularism and “religious communities” in the post-independence period. In this context, these initiatives emerging from the “religious communities” assume significance. For the first time after the Shah Bano controversy (1984), which pitted the Muslim community against the Hindu majority as well as a range of Indian feminists, and reminiscent of debates preceding the Shari’a Act of 1937, efforts to frame a model nikahnama drew a large number of “religious” and “non-religious” Muslim groups into conversation, and set off a consensus building process within the (Muslim) community on the issue of Muslim women’s “entitlements.”
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.
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.
Reexamining Secularism :The Ayodhya Dispute and the Equal Treatment of Religions
2017
It is widely recognized that the secular Indian state unlike its Western counterpart does not follow the strict separation of religion and state, opting to intervene in the domain of religion by treating religions equally. This article examines how the concept of equal treatment of religions is applied in the legal domain by an intellectual history of the Ayodhya litigation and argues that the courts cannot treat religions equally due to the incompatible nature of the claims made by the parties i.e. the history of religion claim of the Hindus vis-a-vis the property rights claim of the Muslims. Departing significantly from the current consensus about the litigation being characterized by defective legal interpretation and political influences, it further argues that the real legal challenge in resolving this dispute is addressing the theological frameworks within modern property law which are dependent on a set of normative inferences embedded in colonial discourse.
Islam and Secularism in Post-Colonial Thought
Springer eBooks, 2017
Islam and Secularism in Post-Colonial Thought "Hadi Enayat's incisive and timely intervention demonstrates convincingly that contemporary scholarship on Islam and secularism often ends up reproducing the same aporias and essentialisms that it claims to oppose, sometimes lapsing into positions of theoretical incoherence. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to think clearly about contemporary questions of religion, reason, politics and power."-Ziad Elmarsafy, Head of Department, Postgraduate and Research Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, King's College London "Three years ago Hadi Enayat redrew the field of judicial studies in Pahlavi Iran by providing, based on copious documentation, counter-narratives to prevailing views of the inherently political character of justice under Reza Pahlavi. Now he has taken on the approaches put forth by Talal Asad and some of his followers-a community of scholars Enayat refers to as 'Asadian'-to draw attention to some of the misguided assumptions underlying their work and problematic conclusions following from it. Enayat documents the tendency in Asadian perspectives to read