Chennai, August 06: Based in Pudukkottai, a small town in Tamil Nadu, Daud Sharifa Khanum heads the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat, a network of some 25,000 Tamil Muslim women working for Muslim women’s rights and empowerment. She has been widely acknowledged for her pioneering work, for which has received numerous national-level awards. Khanum is also planning to start India’s first women’s mosque.
In an interview with Yoginder Sikand, Khanum speaks about work and the manifold problems facing Indian Muslim women.
Could you briefly describe your background?
I was born in a small town in Tamil Nadu in 1964 in a family of modest means. My mother was 47 years old when I was born. I was the youngest of her 10 children. Shortly after I was born, my parents separated because of my father’s illness, and I was brought up by my mother, who was a strong, independent woman. She suffered and struggled a lot in her life — and that was an inspiration for me. She taught in an Urdu school in a village near Trichy. I lived with her, studying in the village till the twelfth grade.
At that time, my brother was a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He wanted me to study in North India, so I enrolled for a three-year course in office management at Aligarh Muslim University. My brother and mother wanted me to have a good education, and to grow up to be economically independent. After my studies at Aligarh, my brother wanted to me stay on in North India, but I decided to return to Tamil Nadu to be with my mother.
My brother, who was a very ‘religious’ person — in the conventional sense — and also very dominating, was angry with my decision and stopped helping both me and my mother financially. At that point, I really had no plans as to what I should do. At most, I thought, I should follow my mother and become a school teacher. When I got back to Tamil Nadu, I began giving private Hindi tuitions to children in the same village where my mother worked.
How did you get involved in women’s activism?
Shortly after I got back, in 1988, I heard about a women’s conference that was to be held in Patna. They needed a translator for the 70-odd women from Tamil Nadu who had been invited as participants. I applied for the job, hoping to earn some money, and got it. I was the only Muslim woman in the entire Tamil Nadu team.
The conference proved to be a turning point in my life. Till then, I had thought that male control over women was something natural, and that it was to be expected for men to boss over and even beat their wives. After all, I had experienced that in my own home. But at the conference I heard women speaking out against male domination, which they did not see as natural or something to be passively accepted at all. I heard so many harrowing tales of women, from different castes and communities, having to suffer the same sort of patriarchal oppression. It made a deep impact on me.
After I returned from the conference I began getting invitations to numerous other women’s conferences through the women I had met in Patna. I learnt so much through these meetings. I travelled to these conferences by myself — this was the first time in my life when I could do things on my own, travel and go about by myself out of the house, free from male control. It fired me with a sense of independence, which was really exhilarating.
These experiences encouraged me to work with women back in Tamil Nadu. I shifted to Pudukkottai, a small town near Trichy where, with a group of women, mainly non-Muslims, we began to work on women’s issues, seeking to address their problems. All sorts of women, of different castes and communities, came to us for help. We did this work in an informal way, with our own personal financial resources. I used my own money, earned through giving tuitions and buying saris from Bangalore and selling them in Pudukkottai for a small profit.
One day, we organised a poster exhibition in a school, where we put up dozens of posters on gender oppression and women’s rights. The collector of the district, a woman called Sheela Ranisugat, came to see the exhibition and was very impressed. She encouraged us to organise such exhibitions in more schools in the area. She also helped me participate in a literacy programme for women in a coastal area in Tamil Nadu which had a heavy Muslim presence.
Some time later, the district collector told me that I should work in a more organised manner for which, she said, we needed to register ourselves as a society. This we did, and STEPS, our registered NGO, came into being. The collector very kindly granted us a plot of land in Pudukkottai, where our office is located today. We started building a small structure there — this was in 1991 — but we had to face tremendous opposition from local people, who were jealous that we had got the land which had a fairly high value.
What made you decide to focus mainly on issues related to Muslim women?
All this while I was working on issues related to women in general. I was hardly conscious of my Muslim identity. Compared to North India, relations between Hindus and Muslims have always been much better in Tamil Nadu. However, things began to change in the 1990s. In 1994, communal clashes broke out between Hindus and Muslims in our district, and this emerged as a new issue for us to focus on.
We brought a group of activists from the People’s Union for Civil Liberties to tour the area and organised peace meetings. Shortly after, communal violence broke out in Nagore, in coastal Tamil Nadu. Muslims bore the brunt. There I met with a Muslim woman whose husband had been killed in the violence. She had no one to support her and her two children. That really struck me. The rising tide of communalism made me realise the desperate need to work with Muslim women.
In 1995-96, I did a project on the socio-economic conditions of Muslim women for the London-based Women Living Under Muslim Laws network. We covered five districts in Tamil Nadu, and I discovered to my horror terrible cases — of women arbitrarily divorced, beaten by drunken husbands, harassed for dowry, some being forced into child marriages, and of even cases of murder and forced suicide that were carefully hushed up. Then, I turned to the Quran.
All this while, I had, like most other Muslim women in India, read the Quran in Arabic, not understanding anything at all but simply reciting it. But when I read the Tamil translation of the Quran, I discovered that all these practices had no sanction at all in the Quran. I increasingly came to realise the magnitude of the problems faced by many Muslim women, the need to address these, and also the fact that many Muslim men were wrongly interpreting Islam in a very patriarchal manner to justify the subordination and oppression of Muslim women.
As I said, I was never very conscious of my Muslim identity before. I was not actively involved in Muslim-specific issues. I was working on issues related to women in general, and these included women from various castes and communities. But my perceptions changed drastically in 2002 when, in the wake of the massive anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat, I visited Gujarat for a fortnight. The charged communal environment, when every Muslim was being looked upon suspiciously, heightened my sense of being a Muslim. That’s when I felt it was necessary to begin working with Muslim women.
Typically, secular women’s groups are reluctant to work with Muslim women. This could be because of a subtle prejudice, in some cases, or simply because Muslim women’s issues are seen to be inextricably linked to Islam, and these groups are scared that by taking up Muslim women’s issues they might provoke the wrath of the maulvis, who might accuse them of interfering in Islam. So, I felt that Muslim women must form their own groups and speak out and work for their own emancipation.
How did you go on to establish the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat?
In 2002, as a STEPS initiative, we set up the Tamil Nadu Muslim Pengal Jamaat, or the Tamil Nadu Women’s Jamaat. In Tamil Nadu — and I suppose this is the case several other parts of India as well — local Muslim communities manage their community affairs through committees or jamaats that meet inside the local mosque. Women are generally forbidden from praying in, or even entering, mosques across most of India, and so these jamaats are entirely male. The jamaats function like caste panchayats, deciding cases of marital disputes, divorce, and so on. Women have no voice in their functioning.
The jamaats are dominated by the maulvis who, like the rest of the men, are generally characterised by a very patriarchal mind-set. Even their understanding of Islam is deeply shaped by their patriarchal mentality. Generally, the jamaats turn a complete blind eye to men dumping their wives or taking a second wife, for which they readily provide so-called ‘Islamic’ sanction, but they rarely, if ever, invoke Islam when it comes to men demanding heavy dowries, beating their wives or denying them their property rights. The jamaat people remain silent on that glaring contradiction.
In most cases, Muslim women simply cannot expect to get justice from these jamaats, nor even a sympathetic hearing. The jamaats even presume to have the authority to excommunicate people from the Muslim community — such is their power. If, out of desperation, a Muslim woman in distress approaches the police for help, they often refuse to listen to their complaints, saying that Muslims have their own personal laws, which the jamaats administer, and that they should approach the jamaats for justice. But since the jamaats don’t generally deliver justice to them, there is nothing they can do.
That is why we felt the need for a separate forum just for Muslim women, where they could discuss their problems and work together to have them solved. This is the basic idea of our women’s jamaat.
You must have faced considerable opposition from men, especially maulvis, for setting up the women’s jamaat and for decrying the injustice of the male jamaats, isn’t it?
Indeed. Initially, for a few years we had to contend with stiff opposition to our work of mobilising Muslim women against oppression and for their rights. I even received several death threats. But I refused to cow down. Only God knows when I shall die, and that will happen when God wills. Men whose hegemony was being threatened by our work wrongly accused me of being anti-Islam. Any challenge to the mullahs is quickly branded in this way, as if the mullahs were synonymous with Islam itself.
How does the women’s jamaat function?
Our women’s jamaat is loosely structured, not tightly controlled. We have grown rapidly over the years, and now have some 25,000 members across Tamil Nadu. Our district units organise meetings once a month, where members as well as women who may not be members who have problems come together to sort out issues.
Most of these relate to women being harassed and tortured in their homes, sexually abused, arbitrarily divorced, or forced to endure their husbands taking a second wife and so on. Some extreme cases even involve murders and forced suicides. Our members help first by listening to the women’s stories and offering them comfort, and then by taking the case up — through lawyers, the local jamaats, the maulvis, the human rights commission, the media, the district administration and, if need be, the police and public demonstrations.
The more serious cases are brought to the state-level meetings that are held every three months at our headquarters in Pudukkottai, where we then work out a plan of action. We also work closely with the police, and our district coordinators regularly attend the police helpline to counsel Muslim women in distress. Till now, we have handled several hundred cases involving Muslim women across Tamil Nadu. Around 40 per cent have been solved through counseling, a third through police intervention, and the rest through legal action.
So far, we have organised over a hundred state-level Muslim women’s conferences, campaigns, workshops, seminars and training programmes. We have units in ten districts in Tamil Nadu, each of which is headed by a district coordinator. We also have a team of five women, including some non-Muslims, in our central office in Pudukkottai. Two out of our ten district coordinators are Hindu women. We have arranged for all our district coordinators to do a bachelor’s degree in sociology — through a correspondence course conducted by the Annamalai University — so that they can better understand the issues that they have to deal with.
Besides addressing cases of Muslim women being harassed by their menfolk, what other work is the women’s jamaat engaged in?
The issue of Muslim women’s economic independence and empowerment is a very crucial one. This is particularly important for women who are abandoned or divorced by their husbands or made to suffer various forms of atrocity and oppression silently because they are economically dependent on their men.
One of our major focuses now is to promote a generation of Muslim women entrepreneurs. We have established contact with some financers — incidentally, all of them are Hindus, because, lamentably, few Muslim men would support such an initiative — and have formed village- and town-level Muslim women’s self-help groups through which we provide small loans to poor Muslim women at a very low level of interest. So far, we have loaned over Rs 2 crore in this way, and the rate of repayment has been almost hundred per cent.
Over the years we have been able to promote almost 500 Muslim women entrepreneurs, who are running small retail and manufacturing units. Most of these women are women who have suffered some sort of marital discord or who come from very poor families. They earn between two and ten thousand rupees a month from their businesses. Besides enabling them to become economically independent, this work gives them a new sense of confidence and freedom, access to the public sphere, and an empowered identity.
My dream is to increase the number of such Muslim women to 5000 over the next few years.
Courtesy: Rediffmail.com