Moving out of the shadows, from silence to assertion
GS Paper 1: Social Empowerment, Communalism, Regionalism & Secularism.
Important For:
Mains Exam: Empowering Muslim women
Muslim women in India are beginning to seek judicial recourse to assert their rights, marking a quiet churning.
The petition challenging Talaq-e-Hasan
A Talaq-e-Hasan petition filed by a Ghaziabad-based woman, seeking to make the divorce pronounced by the husband at an interval of at least a month extra-judicial, was in the limelight recently when Justice S.K. Kaul observed that the practice of Talaq-e-Hasan or divorce pronounced to the wife once a month for three months is “not so improper”.
What is Talaq-e-Hasan?
- A Muslim man can divorce his wife by uttering Talaq once for three months. This practice is called Talaq-e-Hasan. If couples don’t live together, divorce gets formalized after the third utterance in the third month.
- However, if co-habitation occurs after the first or second utterance, parties are assumed to have reconciled and the first or second utterance becomes null and void.
What’re the issues associated with Talaq-e-Hasan?
- Post the divorce, the wife is not allowed to remarry for a specific time. This period is called Iddat. The objective of iddat is to ensure that the woman is not carrying any offspring in her womb.
- Husband and wife cannot marry each other after the third month of abstinence or ‘Third Iddat’. With this, a woman has to marry another man and divorce that man. After divorcing her second husband, she can marry her former or first husband.
Taking judicial recourse to assert the Rights
- The Court’s observation continues the trend of the increasing propensity of Muslim women to stand up for their rights in marriage or otherwise, a clear departure from times when women left the husband’s house in silence, battered, bruised and fearing social opprobrium.
- Indeed, more and more Muslim women are now approaching various courts, including Darul Qaza or shariah courts, for redress of marital grievances.
Increasing awareness of the rights
- While the widely-acclaimed invalidation of instant triple talaq by a five-judge Bench of the Court, in 2017, is well documented, there was a Kerala High Court judgment of 2021 which upheld the validity of khula.
- The court called khula, “the form of divorce conferred upon the wife similar to talaq conferred upon the husband”.
- Post the 2017 verdict, greater awareness of their rights is seeing more and more Muslim women walking out of an abusive marriage, even opting for khula.
There is change
While much has been happening in the judicial fora when it comes to Muslim women’s rights, a silent churning is also going on within the Muslim community in India. Age-old mores are now being questioned, and in many cases, rejected. Allowing the monopoly of sundry maulanas to interpret the scriptures for them has been fading away.
Seeking rights
The women are thinking for themselves, interpreting things for themselves, and speaking for themselves. Muslim women have also been asserting their right to enter mosques to pray. In the past, mosques were considered a men-only zone. Now, women want their sacred space. It started with a petition in the Haji Ali Dargah case in 2016, where women won the right to enter the dargah’s sanctum sanctorum. This kind of a silent assertion of their rights is unprecedented.
The message is clear: Indian Muslim women have found their voice. Be it the issue of divorce or the right to pray in a mosque, they have a mind of their own and are ready to express it.
Some obstacles
Of course, not everything is hunky-dory. Even as women assert their right to end a marriage through khula, some clerics still insist on the man’s consent, thereby defeating the very purpose of khula. On the same lines, even as cases against nikah halala are pending before the Supreme Court for over three years, some maulanas still tend to misuse the provision for halala.
Moving out of the shadows, from silence to assertion
GS Paper 1: Social Empowerment, Communalism, Regionalism & Secularism.
Important For:
Mains Exam: Empowering Muslim women
Muslim women in India are beginning to seek judicial recourse to assert their rights, marking a quiet churning.
The petition challenging Talaq-e-Hasan
A Talaq-e-Hasan petition filed by a Ghaziabad-based woman, seeking to make the divorce pronounced by the husband at an interval of at least a month extra-judicial, was in the limelight recently when Justice S.K. Kaul observed that the practice of Talaq-e-Hasan or divorce pronounced to the wife once a month for three months is “not so improper”.
What is Talaq-e-Hasan?
- A Muslim man can divorce his wife by uttering Talaq once for three months. This practice is called Talaq-e-Hasan. If couples don’t live together, divorce gets formalized after the third utterance in the third month.
- However, if co-habitation occurs after the first or second utterance, parties are assumed to have reconciled and the first or second utterance becomes null and void.
What’re the issues associated with Talaq-e-Hasan?
- Post the divorce, the wife is not allowed to remarry for a specific time. This period is called Iddat. The objective of iddat is to ensure that the woman is not carrying any offspring in her womb.
- Husband and wife cannot marry each other after the third month of abstinence or ‘Third Iddat’. With this, a woman has to marry another man and divorce that man. After divorcing her second husband, she can marry her former or first husband.
Taking judicial recourse to assert the Rights
- The Court’s observation continues the trend of the increasing propensity of Muslim women to stand up for their rights in marriage or otherwise, a clear departure from times when women left the husband’s house in silence, battered, bruised and fearing social opprobrium.
- Indeed, more and more Muslim women are now approaching various courts, including Darul Qaza or shariah courts, for redress of marital grievances.
Increasing awareness of the rights
- While the widely-acclaimed invalidation of instant triple talaq by a five-judge Bench of the Court, in 2017, is well documented, there was a Kerala High Court judgment of 2021 which upheld the validity of khula.
- The court called khula, “the form of divorce conferred upon the wife similar to talaq conferred upon the husband”.
- Post the 2017 verdict, greater awareness of their rights is seeing more and more Muslim women walking out of an abusive marriage, even opting for khula.
There is change
While much has been happening in the judicial fora when it comes to Muslim women’s rights, a silent churning is also going on within the Muslim community in India. Age-old mores are now being questioned, and in many cases, rejected. Allowing the monopoly of sundry maulanas to interpret the scriptures for them has been fading away.
Seeking rights
The women are thinking for themselves, interpreting things for themselves, and speaking for themselves. Muslim women have also been asserting their right to enter mosques to pray. In the past, mosques were considered a men-only zone. Now, women want their sacred space. It started with a petition in the Haji Ali Dargah case in 2016, where women won the right to enter the dargah’s sanctum sanctorum. This kind of a silent assertion of their rights is unprecedented.
The message is clear: Indian Muslim women have found their voice. Be it the issue of divorce or the right to pray in a mosque, they have a mind of their own and are ready to express it.
Some obstacles
Of course, not everything is hunky-dory. Even as women assert their right to end a marriage through khula, some clerics still insist on the man’s consent, thereby defeating the very purpose of khula. On the same lines, even as cases against nikah halala are pending before the Supreme Court for over three years, some maulanas still tend to misuse the provision for halala.