Paper short abstract:

Muslim women's rights activists in India and Pakistan frequently face opposition on religious grounds particularly with relation to marriage and personal laws. This has led activists to strategically engage with religious discourses and actors in order to secure women's rights. This paper will explore the effectiveness of using 'woman-friendly' nikahnamas (Muslim marriage contracts) as a means of securing women's rights without offending religious sensibilities in India and Pakistan. Drawing on primary research, this paper will question how far this approach can go in challenging entrenched patriarchal structures of power.

Paper long abstract:

Religiously-framed approaches to women's rights advocacy, which include those that utilise religious discourses or work through religious leaders and institutions, have increasingly been adopted by a variety of actors, particularly in Muslim contexts including, to some extent, in South Asia. Although 'Islamic feminism' has not gained wide support in India and Pakistan, Muslim women's rights activists have strategically engaged with religious discourses and actors in their struggles to secure women's rights, particularly with regard to marriage and family laws. One of the strategies employed by advocates of Muslim women's rights in India and in Pakistan has been to popularise the notion that women can write their rights into their own nikahnamas (Muslim marriage contracts), particularly in terms of inserting clauses that will secure their rights within marriage. Muslim women's rights activists have proposed the idea of a 'woman-friendly' nikahnama as a means of protecting women's rights without challenging the system of separate personal laws in India, and without challenging religious conservative forces in Pakistan. However, little research has been conducted as to whether this approach has been successful in actually securing rights for women on the ground. This paper will draw on primary research conducted in both contexts to explore in depth whether the nikahnama has been an effective tool in protecting women's rights within marriage and after divorce without raising religious-based objections, or whether it is ineffective in actually challenging deeply entrenched patriarchal structures of power.