Introduction

In recent years, growing numbers of Muslim women in India have been publicly calling for reform of Muslim Personal Law (MPL), justifying their demands for gender equity with religious arguments, referring to the authority of the Qur'an rather than to the Indian Constitution or to the universalistic principles of human rights that have long guided Indian secular feminists in their campaigns for a gender-neutral uniform civil code (UCC) of personal law. These women are part of a trend observable all over the Muslim world, in which ‘a new breed of Muslim women scholaractivists’ (Sikand 2005a) is seriously and critically studying the foundational texts of their religion. They are

Scholars of the Middle East began to use the term ‘Islamic feminism’ in the 1990s for movements then gaining prominence in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere, in which women were attempting, ‘through a rereading of the Qur'an and early Islamic history’ to ‘reclaim their religion… [and] undermine both Islamist patriarchal distortions and Western stereotypes of Islam as backward and terroristic’ (Moghadam 2004: 53).