In 1984 the Supreme Court decided to grant alimony to a sixty-three-year-old Muslim woman named Shah Bano, which under traditional Muslim personal law (sharia) she was not entitled to. Congress, afraid to lose the Muslim vote, accommodated the most reactionary elements in the community and overruled the decision by passing the Muslim Women’s Divorce Act. This law stripped Muslim women of rights in divorce all other women in India enjoy. The Hindu right calls this “minority appeasement” because Muslim men don’t have to pay alimony like Hindus do. The basic democratic demand for a “uniform civil code” applying to all citizens has thus perversely come to be a rallying cry for far-right bigots, while many on the Indian left defend the use by Muslims of “their own” patriarchal, theocratic personal law, as though it’s a democratic right to treat women as property.
The Hindu right also cunningly calls for the “modernization” of madrasas. These traditional Muslim educational institutions, where most students in fact do little except memorize the Koran, had long been in decline thanks their irrelevance to the job market. But in the 1980s they were revived, often with financial support from abroad, as centers of fundamentalism. While everyone should get a good secular education, this is not the goal of the Hindu right, which has introduced enforced lessons in Hinduism into government-run schools and rewritten textbooks to conform to a demented, Hindu-supremacist version of history.
No to Ontario's "Sharia Courts"!
Down With Anti-Muslim Racism!
(from Spartacist Canada No. 142, Fall 2004)