Islamic Feminism in India: Reinterpreting Muslim Personal Law through Faith-Based Gender Justice
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66871/trf-j.v1i3.025Keywords:
Islamic feminism, Muslim Personal Law, ijtihad, gender justice, Qur'anic interpretation, legal pluralism, India, women's rights, religious hermeneutics, Uniform Civil CodeAbstract
This paper examines Islamic feminism as a faith-based paradigm for pursuing gender justice within the framework of Muslim Personal Law (MPL) in India. Situated at the intersection of religious hermeneutics, legal pluralism, and postcolonial feminist theory, the study interrogates how Muslim women scholars and activists deploy concepts such as ijtihad (independent juristic reasoning), tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis), and adl (justice) to challenge patriarchal interpretations embedded in MPL while simultaneously resisting majoritarian demands for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Muslim women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds across urban India, alongside a systematic analysis of secondary literature spanning Islamic jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, and South Asian studies, the paper argues that Islamic feminism in India constitutes a transformative intellectual and social movement that reclaims interpretive agency, reconstructs religious authority, and reimagines the relationship between faith, law, and gender equality. The findings reveal that Muslim women do not experience religion as a monolithic structure of oppression; rather, they navigate and contest overlapping hierarchies of patriarchal authority, communal identity politics, and state power through a hermeneutics of justice rooted in Islamic ethics. The paper contributes to debates on religious feminism, minority rights, and legal reform in pluralist democracies.
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