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Religion, Power, and Place: Three Muslim Women’s Stories in Old Delhi

Kalyani Devaki Menon

Abstract

Affected by the intersection of their religious, class, and gender identities, Muslim women experience both economic and political marginalization in India, and gendered inequalities in the public and private spheres. In this context, they are often depicted as helpless victims, not as agents who draw on available resources to effect change. Moreover, obscuring the very real political and economic forces that create precarity in the lives of Muslim women, Islam is often constructed as the primary force inhibiting women’s agency and power. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Old Delhi’s diverse Muslims to problematize such representations, I show how religion creates space for women to reimagine and re-inscribe their lives. I focus on three Muslim women who represent different class, educational, and sectarian backgrounds to examine how they variously draw on religion to make place for themselves and their communities. Each case reveals the centrality of religion as a source of power in women’s lives, inspiring their actions, bolstering their hopes for a different future, and creating an arena where they try to effect change. Their stories force us to reconfigure notions of agency, and challenge stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women that prevail in India and elsewhere.

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  • 1 The research on which this manuscript is based was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the DeP (...)

1In February 2013, I was speaking with one of my interlocutors in her house in Old Delhi when our conversation turned to politics and how difficult it was for ordinary people to take a stand against powerful politicians.1 She said, “Look, I am alone. An ordinary woman. I often think, it should be this way, it should be that way. But can I change things? When … if someone raises their voice, they are killed…. Humans become silent. Those who speak, they pay a big price.” Steering the conversation to the Gujarat Pogrom of 2002 when Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of the state, she asked, “What happened after that? … Absolutely nothing. So many children were orphaned. So many women were widowed. They had to deal with so much distress there. But did anything happen to Modi?” Citing rumblings in the papers that month I responded, “They are now saying he will be the BJP candidate.” She asked, “For MP” (minister of parliament)?” I replied, “PM” (prime minister). She looked thoughtful and then said, “Oh, for prime minister? Then only Allah is the protector (hafiz) of Hindustan.”

2That February I did not spend much time thinking about the last comment, dismissing it as one of those things people say in conversations like this when they feel despondent. But much has happened in India since then. In May 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies won an absolute majority in parliament and Narendra Modi became the prime minister of India. Five years later, in May 2019, the BJP won an even larger majority in parliament and Modi began his second term. Emboldened by his electoral successes, and taking a 37.4 percent vote share as a mandate from the people, the Modi government launched a series of changes that have reshaped the landscape of contemporary India. In August 2019, the government revoked Article 370 and Article 35A of the Indian Constitution, dismantling the last vestiges of Kashmiri sovereignty that had survived the machinations of successive governments in postcolonial India. In December 2019, the Modi government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that many see as a violation of the religious equality promised by the Indian Constitution in its creation of a pathway to citizenship for only non-Muslims from South Asia. These moves have consolidated the Hindu supremacist vision of India as a Hindu nation, one in which the upper-caste Hindu is the normative national subject. Protests and dissent have been met with police brutality and draconian laws like the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), leading to the arrest and detention of students, activists, journalists, and academics, many of whom have been languishing in pre-trial detention for years. The institutions of the state, designed to act as a check on executive power, have instead been used repeatedly to threaten and silence opposing voices.

  • 2 Several scholars have critiqued representations of Islam as a totalizing and deterministic force (S (...)

3It is in this India that I began to think more deeply about my interlocutor’s comment that only Allah is the protector of Hindustan. It is not easy for Muslims like her to speak truth to power in Modi’s India, although many, including her, do. Even critiquing Modi can be dangerous, which is why I have chosen not to name my interlocutor here or provide any biographical details. A pious Muslim, she often talked about Islam, and repeatedly gestured to the materiality of God’s power in her life by saying that Allah has always helped her when she has been in need. Looking back over fieldnotes and interviews conducted in Old Delhi since 2012, I realized that her comment might have deeper implications. If Allah’s power could have material effects in the world, perhaps it was in this sense that she saw Allah as the protector of Hindustan. In Old Delhi, she is not alone in thinking about the materiality of God’s power in and on the world. In this article, I focus on the narratives of three Muslim women in Old Delhi. Differently positioned in terms of sectarian affiliation, economic situation, educational level, and family dynamics, for each of these women religion created a site for exercising agency, animating their efforts to reshape their lives and worlds and make place for themselves and their communities. While Islam is often represented as the primary force that inhibits Muslim women’s agency and authority,2 here I illustrate its centrality as a source of power in women’s lives, inspiring their words and deeds, bolstering their hopes for a different future, and creating an arena where they might effect change. Their stories force us to reconfigure our notions of agency to make space for religious practice, and challenge stereotypes about Islam and Muslim women that prevail in India and elsewhere in the world today.

The Politics of Representation

  • 3 More commonly, mazlum, or victim of oppression.

4“Our government stands by har majloom (every victim).3 Those people (Opposition leaders) are trying to trick Muslim sisters to push them back in their lives” (Tribune News Service 2024). Prime Minister Narendra Modi said these words at an election rally in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in February 2022, amid the anger expressed by Muslim women who were being turned away from educational institutions in the south Indian state of Karnataka for wearing a hijab. The BJP government of Karnataka had just issued an order that enabled government educational institutions to deny entry to those wearing hijabs, a move that many feared would only further marginalize Muslim women in a country where Muslims are already the most socio-economically disadvantaged group (Sachar 2006). In the same speech Modi said, “Muslim sisters and daughters understand our intentions. We gave them protection from triple talaq. Now when the BJP received their support, some people got restless” (Tribune News Service 2024). Seizing an opportunity to demonize Islam and Muslim men, the Modi government had indeed come out strongly against triple talaq, the practice of saying talaq (divorce) three times to get divorced instantly. Triple talaq was deemed unconstitutional by a majority decision of a five-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court in August 2017, and criminalized in 2019 (Gupta, Gokarisksel, and Smith 2020; Parveen, this issue). Drawing on these controversies in his speech, Modi suggested that his government had been actively involved in saving Muslim women in India from an oppressive religious patriarchy.

5The representation of Muslim women as victims in need of saving from the supposed tyrannies of Islam, and specifically from Muslim men, is a trope that has been used since colonial times to justify foreign domination and intervention in different parts of the world (Ahmed 1992; Abu-Lughod 2013; Zeweri and Osman 2022). In these cases, Islam is constructed as the primary force of oppression in Muslim women’s lives, while the historical and political conditions that affect their lives and circumstances are obscured (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002). In India, where Hindu supremacist violence against Muslim women is an ever-present threat that very much circumscribes their lives, movements, and employment choices, stereotypes about Islam and Muslim men are often used to conjure up an image of women’s oppression while obscuring the very real political and economic circumstances that marginalize them in the country (Khan 2007; Jamil 2018; Menon 2022a; Menon 2022b). And indeed, the weaponization of gender issues by figures such as Modi, is part of a global tendency to use the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman to consolidate support for imperial and nationalist projects through what Sara Farris calls “femonationalism”—the use of women’s rights to further a variety of political agendas through the stigmatization of Islam and Muslim men (Farris 2017:4; Gupta et al. 2020). This process not only obscures the state’s implication in physical and structural violence against Muslim women, it also ignores the diversity of voices and perspectives of Indian Muslim women, and of course their investment and engagement in manifold struggles for themselves, their families, their various communities, and the world they live in.

6The Hindu Right has thrived on representing Muslims as a potentially violent “other,” one that is seen to pose a threat to a nation conceived as Hindu (Hansen 1999; Jaffrelot 1999, 2007, 2021; Bachetta 2004; Menon 2010; Basu 2021; Hansen and Roy 2022). The specter of “love jihad” has been invoked to argue that Muslim men pose a particular threat to Hindu women, while practices like triple talaq and veiling, as we see in Modi’s speech, are cited to conjure up the threat they allegedly pose to supposedly hapless and helpless Muslim women. The demonization of Islam and Muslim men in these discourses has not only enabled extreme violence against Indian Muslims, but it has also been effectively used to garner electoral support for the BJP from Hindus across caste, class, and sectarian tradition, especially in north India. Moreover, the configuring of Muslim women as oppressed victims in need of rescue by a benevolent state has enabled the Modi government to find common cause and garner support from many who might not be as receptive to its more strident Hindu supremacist rhetoric and policies.

7Prevailing stereotypes about Muslim women are very much enabled by the fact that they are often rendered “voiceless” and “invisible” in most writing about them (Jamil 2018:xiii,7). Such writing privileges Islamic texts and legal codes as the lenses through which to understand Muslim women’s lives, a focus that enables a monolithic construction of Muslim women presumably governed by religious prescriptions (Kirmani 2013:10–13; Jamil 2018:7). Paying attention to women’s narratives not only challenges the very category of “The Muslim Woman,” but also reveals their multiple and intersecting identities (Kirmani 2013:13,163), their agency (Jamil 2018; Menon 2022b) and their power (Flueckiger 2006). And, as I show in this article, women’s narratives reveal how they variously configure religion as a source of power, hope, and inspiration as they traverse the difficult circumstances of their lives, rather than as an over-deterministic set of rules and codes that are unilaterally foisted upon them.

8Hailing from different sects, classes, and castes, expressing diverse political opinions and levels of religiosity, and representing a range of occupations and educational backgrounds, the Muslim women I worked with in Old Delhi are not easily rendered into the tricked and helpless victims mentioned in Modi’s speech. And indeed, none of the fifty women I worked with intensively, nor the many others I engaged with while conducting fieldwork, were either forced to veil or divorced through the process of triple talaq. While certainly some of them struggled against problematic husbands, difficult families, and community expectations, these struggles are familiar to women across religious communities and of all classes and castes, in a region where gender inequality is entrenched and patrilineal authority is often wielded to circumscribe the lives of women. And perhaps most importantly, however difficult their circumstances, I saw the many ways in which women sought to change their lives and worlds, often drawing on religious power and authority to do so.

  • 4 This project was based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews and conversations (...)

9In this article, I discuss three women I first met in 2012 while conducting fieldwork on religion and placemaking amongst diverse groups of Muslims in Old Delhi, a place where Muslim culture and history are deeply embedded in a religiously plural landscape. While initially cautious about their interactions with a Chicago-based scholar with a Hindu name amid rising Islamophobia in India and elsewhere, as they got to know me, men and women generously agreed to be interviewed, invited me to their homes, religious sites, and events related to my project, and enabled the research that became the basis for my ethnography, Making Place for Muslims in Contemporary India (2022a).4 Here I focus on three women I knew well, whose narratives illuminate how religion enables them to make place for themselves and their communities in contemporary India. While these women should not be seen as representing “Muslim women” or even women of their particular backgrounds and sectarian traditions, their narratives do challenge prevailing representations of Muslim women in India that have been consistently weaponized in the service of the Hindu Right. And importantly, when we seriously engage with their narratives we are forced to make space in our texts for what Amira Mittermaier calls “orientations” that are open to the interventions of the “non-human” in the world, and that gesture to what lies “beyond the human horizon” (2021:25–26).

Allah’s Barakat and Muslim Placemaking

  • 5 All names are pseudonyms to protect the identity of those I worked with. In some cases, I have chan (...)
  • 6 For more on the jinn who inhabit Delhi’s landscapes, see Taneja (2018). For jinn in other parts of (...)

10Humans were not the only inhabitants of Farhana Baji’s house in Old Delhi which had been occupied by her family for well over a hundred years.5 Apart from the cats who always found their way into her home (and heart), there were others whom we could not see but who occasionally made their presence known. Once when her youngest child, Sohail, refused to do something she asked claiming that he was too tired, he thought he saw a man standing in the courtyard looking at him as he lay in his small room. He rubbed his eyes as he got up and walked out of the room, but there was no one in the courtyard beyond. Sitting with Farhana Baji and myself a couple of weeks later, he said this was one of the invisible inhabitants of their home, expressing displeasure at Sohail’s behavior by making his presence known. Mostly, these inhabitants remained invisible, like the jinn who also resided in their home.6 This was not the first time I had heard of the invisible inhabitants of Farhana Baji’s house. On several occasions she had told me not to block the entrance when the azan (call to prayer) sounded, to allow them to pass and attend the evening prayer. She once told me, “the spirits of martyrs (shahid) are all over Delhi. They have to go to namaz (prayers) too. We should not block their way during the azan.” Sitting in the covered verandah off her courtyard she said, “This house does not belong to us. We will die and others will take over. But the spirits of these martyrs will stay here forever. This place is actually theirs, not ours. They do not disturb humans, but they are always there.”

11It is interesting to think of Old Delhi as a landscape enlivened by the spirits of Muslim martyrs amid the revanchist politics of the Hindu Right, and their many violent attempts to establish India as a Hindu place. Although one may not be aware of them, martyrs are understood to be alive rather than dead (Quran 2:154; 3:169), and to have sacrificed themselves in struggles against oppression and injustice (Smith and Haddad 2002:ix). Like humans they also performed their daily prayers according to Farhana Baji, acts that imbued the landscape with God’s barakat (blessings). Farhana Baji described Old Delhi as a place infused with barakat, the blessings that have accrued over the centuries because of the ibadat (worship) of so many of its denizens, human and otherwise. For her, God’s power is real, mobilized through prayer, and inflecting the landscape with barakat.

12Farhana Baji also believed that prayer enabled her to effect change. One day she showed me a notebook in which she had cut and pasted several duas (prayers) from an old calendar she owned, along with instructions for their recitation. Explaining each of these to me, she elaborated on her understanding of the effects of God’s word in the world. For instance, she explained that one should recite “Ya Rahimo” a hundred times after morning prayers. She said, “By reading this a hundred times, everyone will love you.” Prayers that imbue places with barakat. Prayers that make people love you in a country where the politics of hate and disavowal are an everyday reality. Prayers draw God’s power and its material effects into our lives and worlds, according to Farhana Baji. Here, Farhana Baji recognizes the importance of her actions, but also gestures to a power beyond the human that is acting on the world. As Amira Mittermair notes, we need to take seriously our interlocutors’ insistence that there is a power that transcends the human, that is greater than the human—a notion that “destabilizes the idea that the human is the author and end of all actions, the ground of all that matters” (2021:26). For Farhana Baji, this power inspires and animates her actions, enabling her to be an agent of change in the world.

  • 7 For more on the BJP’s bulldozer politics, see Saikia, Chakravarty, and Sharma 2022.

13An observant Sunni Muslim, Farhana Baji understands Allah’s barakat to be immanent in the world, materially affecting the lives of people like her, and protecting her home and her place in a country that is increasingly hostile. At a moment when so many Muslims have died at the hands of right-wing Hindu mobs in contemporary India, and bulldozers demolish their homes and neighborhoods,7 Farhana Baji poignantly suggests that the spirits of the shahid can never be dislodged from places by mere human beings. Neither can Allah’s barakat, drawn to the world through the prayers of ordinary Muslims like her and other pious beings who share her locality. While she often expressed regret that she never attended college, and bemoaned her limited financial means as a widow earning a living from homebased work with children to feed and educate, Farhana Baji did not construct herself as a helpless victim in contemporary India. Instead, she positioned herself as an agent whose actions drew God’s power, blessings, love, and protection to an increasingly beleaguered India, and to the diverse people who reside there. In her narrative, her acts and the acts of countless humans and non-humans over the centuries have kept Old Delhi a place of and for Muslims despite the revanchist politics of the Hindu Right.

14Here it is important to understand that prayers are not just rituals through which one expresses piety, but can also be understood as performative acts through which one inhabits a particular form of subjectivity (Butler 1993), and as the “regular work” through which locality is produced (Appadurai 1996:180–81). Moreover, religious acts are not just about the transcendent and otherworldly (Fadil and Fernando 2015), but are also very much about the anxieties and aspirations of the present (Maqsood 2017), and about securing one’s place in the world (Menon 2022a). And the meaning of these religious acts can only be understood against the backdrop of the historical circumstances that people find themselves in, amid the powerful social and political forces that shape their lives and worlds (see Asad 1993). Indeed, Farhana Baji’s narrative about the material effects of prayer is particularly poignant when situated in Modi’s India and its continuous assaults on Muslim citizenship, life, livelihood, and place. It must also be understood in the context of her other actions, including her regular trips from Old Delhi to Shaheen Bagh between December 2019 and February 2020 to protest the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the police brutality faced by students who came out to oppose it. These acts also illuminate the plural identities that Farhana Baji inhabits—as an Indian protecting constitutional rights with others of all religions, castes, classes, ethnicities, and genders; as a mother of a college-age son disturbed by state violence against students; and as a member of a religious minority concerned about the erosion of religious equality and Muslim place in Modi’s India. At Shaheen Bagh she joined thousands of others to recite the preamble to the Indian Constitution, to raise slogans of protest, to recite the Urdu poetry that she loves, and also to pray. Indeed, both prayer and protest are forms of the political through which Farhana Baji hopes to remake the place she lives in.

Angels, Mad Men, and the Powers of Pious Women

15A devout Twelver Shia, Maryam Baji also believed in invisible beings who inhabit and sacralize the homes and streets of Old Delhi. Before the maghrib azan (evening call to prayer), she would always turn on a light or burn a candle in her small one-room home. She said, “you should have some light because then firishte (angels) will come to your home.” She was not alone in believing in angelic visitors. Her neighbor and relative also believed that angels visited when the maghrib azan sounded and left her door open for them. Importantly, it was not only angels who wandered through the galis (streets) of Old Delhi, but potentially also the “Maula,” the Twelfth Imam, believed by Shias to be in occultation. Like many other Shias in Old Delhi, Maryam Baji once told me that one should treat strangers of all religions with care and kindness because they could be the Maula. The idea that the Maula’s potential appearance required kindness to strangers of all religions testifies to the religiously plural vision that still lingers in Old Delhi despite the exclusionary politics of the Hindu Right. Maryam Baji’s religious practices often differed from those of Farhana Baji and other Sunni Muslims in Old Delhi, especially in her devotion to the Prophet’s family and the Twelve Imams. There were other small differences in the timing and manner of her namaz, and in the everyday religious rituals that she and other women in her community engaged in. However, like Farhana Baji she was assiduous in her performance of her daily prayers, and she too believed in their powers. After completing her namaz she often distributed the barakat from her prayers by blowing on those who were around, including non-Muslims like me.

16Maryam Baji firmly believed that God would intervene if she prayed for help. And help she often needed, because of her abusive partner Abbas Bhai, a man she had run away with to escape her violent husband. The fact that she had left her husband and son only exacerbated Maryam Baji’s feelings of vulnerability. She told me once that, although she wanted to leave Abbas Bhai, she was worried about what people would say if she left another marriage. Her worries are not unfounded, since women who leave abusive marriages or marry again often find it difficult to count on support from families who disapprove of their actions (Snell-Rood 2014:64). Maryam Baji was estranged from her father, and her mother was not in a position to support her. She had no brothers and felt strongly that Abbas Bhai would treat her better if she did. She told me, “He takes advantage of the fact that I have nobody.” Maryam Baji also worried that she would not be able to support herself because she had no formal education and could not read or write, except Arabic to read the Quran. In fact, Maryam Baji had left Abbas Bhai once before I met her. Initially staying with her Hindu best friend, she eventually found her own place to stay and supported herself by working as a domestic servant for a few months. However, she found things too difficult and eventually moved back in with Abbas Bhai. These experiences are of course not unique to Muslim women like Maryam Baji, especially in India where one in three women have reported experiencing physical abuse, and the conviction rate of men in the few cases of domestic violence that actually get reported to the police is extremely low (Jacob and Chattopadhyay 2019:53,55). And indeed, women of all religions stay in abusive marriages for economic reasons, and especially if they have no property of their own (Panda and Aggarwal 2005). The fact that, in these circumstances, Maryam Baji sought refuge with her Hindu best friend who offered it to her unconditionally, is only surprising if we attempt to privilege religious identity over all the other intersecting communities that women in Old Delhi, and elsewhere, belong to.

17Despite her concerns, Maryam Baji still dreamed of leaving Abbas Bhai one day. She often told me how she had stored all the things she had bought when she had left him before at her friend’s house in case she needed to disappear again. She showed me the money she had secretly saved from the small amount that Abbas Bhai gave her to run the house. And she said that every time he was physically cruel to her, she took photographs, determined to use them against him one day. She also refused to cook for him or do any of the housework when he treated her badly. While these actions did not necessarily change her current circumstances, she certainly saw them as a form of protest. Indeed, such acts are among a wealth of strategies that women and other marginalized groups around the world have used when they have found themselves unable to fight back in other ways (Lanser 1993; see also Fabian and Young 2020; Ahmed 2020). And importantly, as Ammara Maqsood suggests, we need to expand our notions of agency to make room for the effects of time, networks, and the actions of others when we look at how individuals forge a “meaningful life in a world where they have limited control” (2023:59, 72). While Maryam Baji dreamed of a different future for herself, she also did her best to keep Abbas Bhai’s anger at bay in the present, managing him and his needs as well as she could. Although Abbas Bhai did not earn much from the juice cart he operated in Old Delhi, she managed the meagre household budget well to make sure that they always had good meals at home. In their lighter moments, Maryam Baji called him a mad man to his face. At other times, when she was very angry, she called him worse things in her conversations with me.

18Maryam Baji was convinced that God would punish Abbas Bhai for his treatment of her. This was particularly apparent one cold February evening after a bad fight in front of their neighbors. Maryam Baji had refused to cook or do any housework for him for days after the fight, and was not speaking to him. She said to me, “He will pay for what he has done …. God will make him cry tears of blood for all he has done. I sat on the janamaz (prayer rug) and said badduas (cursed him). He will pay for all the things he has done to me.” I was not the only person she said this to; she repeated this to the neighbors who had witnessed the event and also to Abbas Bhai’s sister, whom we visited one day. Maryam Baji clearly believed that cursing Abbas Bhai from her prayer rug after completing her prayers was an act which would have material effects. To her neighbors and in-laws, she presented herself as a pious Muslim woman whose prayers made her powerful, and whose curses Abbas Bhai should therefore be wary of. She had no doubt that God would intervene on her behalf and punish the man responsible for so much physical and emotional abuse.

19While the powers of prayer may not be immediately apparent in most cases, sometimes situations arose that might suggest otherwise. For instance, a few days later when their relationship had just begun to revert to its normal routine, disaster struck. Maryam Baji found out that her adult son from her previous marriage had been arrested and booked into Tihar Jail in Delhi. When she tearfully asked Abbas Bhai to help her bail her son out, he had laughed in her face. I happened to be in her house later that day when the maghrib azan sounded, and noticed that she was reciting something under her breath. After she had completed her evening prayers, I asked her what she had been reciting during the azan. She responded that she had been saying duas to ask God to release her son from jail. When Abbas Bhai walked into their home later that evening, she asked him again to help her bail her son out of jail, perhaps hoping my presence would put pressure on him. While marginally better behaved in front of me, he still did not agree to help her. However, a few days later, he did give her the bail money. Did Abbas Bhai simply relent or did God intervene? For Maryam Baji it was the combination of her prayers to God, the fortitude and courage her faith gave her, the threat of her refusal to take care of Abbas Bhai, and her skillful management of him that ultimately secured her son’s release from jail. Indeed, while prayers may be powerful, so too are the everyday actions of individuals struggling to transform their lives in very difficult circumstances. And of course, lighting up homes for angels and preparing to encounter the Maula through deliberate acts of kindness and care to strangers of all religions, not only strengthened her hand as a pious Muslim woman, it also allowed her to hope for another possible future.

Life, Love, and Contested Traditions

  • 8 The school itself was run by the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic reform movement founded in 1941 by Mau (...)

20Drawn to traditions of South Asian Islam that emphasize transcendent power and textual traditions (Robinson 2013; Osella and Osella 2013), Abida never discussed invisible beings in her home. Instead, she spoke to me about the importance of human action in the world guided by the teachings of the foundational texts. In her own life she very much strived to live according to the guidance of these texts. When I met her in 2014, she had left her husband and was living with her youngest son in a rented flat in Old Delhi, while her elder son and daughter were away at a residential Islamic school.8 Abida first told me about her marital problems in 2013, although at the time she was still trying to work things out with her husband. By 2014 she had given up, and since he had refused to grant her a divorce, Abida was trying to obtain a divorce by other means. Although it had already been six months since she had left him, the qazi (Islamic jurist) who was helping Abida end her marriage had recommended waiting another three months before finalizing it. Abida was waiting, but not very patiently. “I have found someone else I want to marry,” she said. They were both part of the same Islamic organization, committed to the same religious path, and their “personality and ideas match perfectly.” She added, “He is also very handsome.” While they spoke occasionally on the phone, they both believed that they must only have limited contact until the nikah (marriage), and so the slow divorce was a source of unhappiness.

  • 9 This is a pseudonym.
  • 10 For more on Islamic reform movements in South Asia, see Osella and Osella (2013).
  • 11 The Muslim Club had a relatively small following in Old Delhi.

21A science teacher at a prestigious Muslim girls’ school in Old Delhi, Abida already had one master’s degree and had completed the requirements for another in Islamic Studies. She was also the founder of a Muslim women’s religious group called the Muslim Club.9 Both education and class privilege distinguished Abida from Maryam Baji and Farhana Baji, authorized her religious knowledge, and enabled her work with the Muslim Club. Like many Islamic reform movements in South Asia, the Muslim Club urged Muslims to return to the foundational texts, and avoid what it understood to be innovations in local Islamic practice and acts that attributed a partner to God.10 For instance, Abida and other members of her Muslim Club insisted that prayer and supplication at the shrines of Sufi saints were problematic, and that all requests for help should be directed only to Allah. When people make supplications to others, Abida asserted, “Allah Tala (God the Exalted) says, why aren’t you asking me?” Such statements were deeply contested by other Old Delhi Muslims for whom such acts were an integral part of their religious practice. These contestations reveal some of the tensions between transcendence and immanence in Indian Islamic traditions, and how these articulate with the notion of the oneness of God (Bigelow 2021; see also Robinson 2013:29, 40–44; Pernau 2013:38–47; Menon 2022a:123–24). They also illuminate the diversity of perspectives and practices of Islam amongst Indian Muslim women that become apparent when we pay attention to their narratives about religion. While Abida’s religious understanding and practice were just one, often impugned, articulation of Islam amongst many in Old Delhi,11 what is important from the perspective of this article is how religion provided a site for her to exercise agency. Saba Mahmood’s work on agency is instructive here, both in her challenge to look at agency in non-liberal contexts in which ethical self-cultivation is an important aspiration, and in her insistence that such acts are not apart from the political (2005). For Abida, religion inspired her to act upon both herself and the world, to exercise her “visions and hopes” (Maqsood 2023:58), albeit in ways that did not resonate with many in Old Delhi.

  • 12 The term maslak is used to refer to the different schools of Islamic reform in South Asia, such as (...)
  • 13 The four schools of law are Hanafi, Shafai, Hanbali, and Maliki.
  • 14 For more on teachings that the Muslim Club found particularly important, see Menon (2022a:92–94).

22Founding the Muslim Club represented Abida’s efforts to inhabit a particular form of Muslim subjectivity, one in which engaging in dawa (religious outreach) and disseminating her understanding of Islam to other Muslim women was a critical extension. She and other members of the Muslim Club were adamant in their rejection of maslak, the “normative orientations” of the different traditions of Islamic reform in South Asia (Tareen 2020),12 and all four schools of Sunni Law,13 insisting that Muslims must strictly adhere to what was prescribed in the foundational texts. While the use of social media enabled her to draw on the teachings of multiple Islamic scholars around the world whom she respected, she emphasized the importance of using one’s own reading of the texts to weigh the merits of these perspectives over conformity to any particular interpretation.14 Such readings sometimes led adherents of the Muslim Club to adopt practices that few other Muslims in India engage in, such as the veiling practices discussed below. They also informed Abida’s decision to wait another three months to divorce her husband at the instruction of the qazi, rather than pursue other paths to divorce that may have been available to her (see Vatuk 2019).

23The particular Muslim subjectivity that Abida and other members of the Muslim Club sought to inhabit through these acts, was one that marked its distinction by rejecting many practices of Indian Muslims that they argued were influenced by Indian culture and were not prescribed in the foundational texts. It is as important to be wary of such characterizations of Indian Islam, as it is to question the Muslim Club’s claim to an “authentic” Islam unaffected by local context. Indeed, the Muslim Club’s practices must be situated in the context of a country where the disavowal of Muslims and the erasure of its Islamic past is an everyday reality. In this context the Muslim Club’s efforts to distinguish themselves through their practices—both from other Muslims and from Hindus—becomes a way to establish their distinction and visibly claim place for themselves amidst the revanchist politics of the Hindu Right. Their critique of Islamic traditions wherein the boundaries between Hindus and Muslims are blurred can be understood as a politics of distinction that seeks to define Muslim identity as bounded and clearly demarcated in the face of erasure. Indeed, a similar politics of distinction has characterized many Islamic reform movements in South Asia since the nineteenth century, and, as Irfan Ahmad has argued, has very much been triggered by Hindu majoritarianism and Hindutva politics in colonial and postcolonial India (2009:95–97, 164). While this politics of distinction very visibly marks the presence of Muslims amid Hindu nationalist and majoritarian tendencies in India, it has also been rejected by many Old Delhi Muslims for its rigid and exclusionary constructions of Muslim identity.

24Abida’s efforts to spread her ideas to other Muslims in Old Delhi, often led her to suddenly embark on missions to prevent what she deemed “incorrect” or “inauthentic” Islamic practices. These missions took her away from her husband, children, and home. This was one of the things that annoyed her husband, a man who did not share her religious commitments. He did not care for her sudden departures from the house, especially on holidays and weekends when he was home and wanted to spend time with her. She said, “My husband does not like this. [He says,] Sunday is for me only…. I say, I have to go, … because all this [local practices] is not there [in the foundational texts]. I want to go. My teacher says, go when you are called.” Her husband also did not appreciate the time she spent giving religious lectures around Old Delhi and beyond, and her commitment to studying religion. Most of all, he did not like the way she dressed—always in a burqa and hijab, and usually with gloves and socks so that only her eyes were visible. He repeatedly asked her not to wear these when she was out with him, a request she firmly refused to comply with. She had not veiled when they first got married, and her increasing religiosity after marriage as she began to study Islam became a problem for him—it embarrassed him when they interacted with his friends and acquaintances. While this caused a lot of tension in their marriage, ending the relationship altogether was not what he wanted.

25For most of those who knew her, myself included, Abida could be a little intimidating. She was passionate, articulate, always grounded her religious arguments in textual sources, and never held back from expressing her views about other people’s religious practices. To teach her version of Islam was a religious commitment to her, one she took very seriously. It is this religious commitment that often led her to ignore social niceties, invite herself into the intimate spaces of people’s homes, and lecture to complete strangers about “correct” religious practices. I was always struck by Abida’s ability to enter any home and ask to speak, especially as an anthropologist whose research is based on similar intrusions of intimate spaces. Yet, unlike me, Abida never seemed to question her right to be in these spaces; indeed, she saw it as her religious duty to not only be present, but to intervene in the lives of others. As I have noted elsewhere, although many disagreed with what she said, because of her familiarity with religious sources few pushed back against her efforts to “correct” their religious practices in her presence (Menon 2022a:142). She was a powerful woman who seemed to do what she wanted, whether in her life or in the places it took her. And as is the case for women in many religious traditions in South Asia (Moin 2018; Knight 2011, Flueckiger 2006; Khandelwal 2004), it was religion that gave her the authority to shape her life and the lives of those she encountered, as well as an arena in which to do so.

26Indeed, while Islam is often represented as a force that inhibits women’s power and abilities, it was clear that it was the primary force that enabled Abida to live out her aspirations in private and public. It gave her the strength to divorce a husband who attempted to curtail her religious commitments, to marry another whom she considered perfectly compatible, to adopt visible practices of piety that others might eschew, to leave her home and engage in the public sphere when she deemed it necessary, and to continue her efforts to make place for herself and her views through dawa. For Abida, the trials of everyday life, whether caused by personal circumstances or by political tides, were part of God’s plan and human beings were accountable for their actions at these moments. In one of her lectures, she told a gathering of women that on the day of judgement, they would have to account for what they did in their lives: “The trials of our lives are about this, so Allah can check on us. Allah says, …. I made life for this reason. Every moment we are being tested.” As a Muslim woman seeking to define her own future and the future of her community, Abida saw herself as an agent—not a victim who needed to be saved by others. She had a very clear vision of the world she wanted to live in, one that was very much informed by her religious understanding. And indeed, she attempted to produce that world in her everyday life, not just through dawa, but also by deliberately making time to converse with people like me. Very conscious of engaging with a non-Muslim scholar writing about Muslims in a country in which Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence are endemic, she told me, “Islam means peace. We have to maintain peace in the environment. In the world. Everywhere. We have to.” Later in the same conversation she said, “Allah Tala says, you are all born of the same mother and father (ma-bap) …. You are all sisters and brothers (behan-bhai). Those who are Hindu, they are my sisters. Sardars are my sisters. Jains, also mine.” Abida’s insistence on the kinship of all humans and the importance of maintaining peace are grounded in her religious vision. It was a vision that not only informed her actions in the world, but also provided a stark contrast to the exclusionary politics and violence of the Hindu Right in contemporary India.

Conclusion

27“There is no religion that says people should fight. Or force people. This is what politicians have done. Like what Modi has done. This is wrong.” Conversations about religion were often, inevitably, about politics, as is clear in this statement by one of the Muslim women I worked with in Old Delhi. Sometimes these conversations suggested that all religions embraced a common morality despite their many differences. At other times they contested the stereotypical rendering of Islam as a violent religion by suggesting that Muslims had a religious duty to make peace in the world. And often, as was the case with the three women I have written about here, they constructed a vision of a common humanity—where people of all religions were kin, where one must treat everyone with the same kindness they would show the Maula, where Allah’s barakat touched all human beings and was embedded in the places they lived, and where the spirits of Muslim martyrs could not be dislodged from a country shared with Hindus and others for centuries, despite the best efforts of the Hindu Right. Narratives about religious pluralism and a common humanity in the face of Hindu chauvinism, and narratives that mark Old Delhi as a place where Muslims unquestionably, indelibly, and visibly belong, illustrate how religion not only creates a place for expressing political sentiments, but can indeed be understood as a form of the political in contemporary India. These narratives were part of conversations that took place at a historical moment marked by the ascendance of the Hindu Right and increasing Hindu supremacist violence, between an anthropologist with a Hindu name writing on Indian Muslims, and Muslim women who wanted to shape her understanding and representation of them in publications. As such these narratives themselves are acts of placemaking in a country where the place for Muslims is rapidly shrinking.

28Can prayer be understood as a form of the political and a mode of agency? Many might discount some of the religious acts that I have discussed here as the impotent acts of a powerless people. It is important to note, however, that the three women in this article do not see themselves as powerless. All three believe in the power of prayer and, in different ways, they see themselves as empowered by God to change their lives and circumstances. While secular frameworks have delimited our conceptions of agency and politics (Mahmood 2005), in order to seriously engage with these women’s narratives, we need to make place for what lies beyond the “human horizon” (Mittermaier 2021) that they insist acts with them. This is particularly crucial when writing about those who have “limited control” over their lives and circumstances (Maqsood 2023:72). And it is necessary in places like India where Muslims must live amid violence, dispossession, erasure, and silencing; where some claim, “only Allah is the protector of Hindustan.” In such contexts, the Muslims I worked with recognized that while they must act, their actions alone were not necessarily enough. Theirs is a world in which they not only need God to act with them, but also they know that God does. And this knowing is precisely what sustains life in the midst of despair, protest in the face of rising authoritarianism, and hope for what could be.

29Farhana Baji sees herself as one among countless Muslims in the past and the present whose everyday religious acts imbue their locality with God’s barakat, binding together denizens of all religions with blessings accrued over centuries, and rooting Muslims firmly in place. While sacralizing Old Delhi through acts of prayer, she also simultaneously joins thousands of others at Shaheen Bagh to demand equal citizenship. Maryam Baji’s prayers and actions position her on the side of angels so that even in the most violent circumstances, she reminds Abbas Bhai that she will not be taken for granted by refusing to cook and clean for him. She understands her piety to give her the power to curse Abbas Bhai, and is certain that God will deliver justice. And in her daily life she is guided by a Maula who transcends religious boundaries, urging the pious to be kind, to share blessings and prosperity with all, regardless of religious identity. Abida sees herself as God’s agent, responsible for creating a perfect world. Her firm commitment to living a life according to textual prescriptions enables her to leave a man who tried to circumscribe her religious practice, and to embark on the life she wants with another. Adopting particularly visible markers of piety, her very presence makes place for Muslims in Old Delhi, as does her dawa, however contested. For these three women, religion was a source of power that enabled change and gave them hope. Drawing on the resources available to them, whether this was their understanding of texts, the powers they believed were conferred on them through prayer, or their appeals to God to protect people and places experiencing turmoil, they sought to change their lives and worlds. And clearly, prayer was not the only way in which they challenged the status quo. But certainly at those moments when other means of protest were difficult, rather than give up, accept their fate, and remain silent, they turned to God and religious practice.

  • 15 For more on the remission of the sentences of the men convicted in the Bilkis Bano case, see: The W (...)

30Paying attention to women’s narratives is important because they illuminate how women represent themselves, and how they want to be seen and understood. This is especially important in Modi’s India where Muslim women are a particularly charged symbol. Constructions of Muslim women as helpless victims of religion and religious patriarchy have enabled the Hindu Right to not only demonize Islam and Muslim men, but also to position themselves as the saviors of Muslim women despite engaging in horrific violence against them. Indeed, in the same year that Modi declared that his government was protecting Muslim women, Bilkis Bano found herself having to live amongst those who had been convicted of raping her and murdering her family during the Gujarat Pogrom.15 Modi’s savior narrative deflects attention from the very real political forces that have in fact made Muslim women a privileged target of Hindu supremacist violence and political posturing. In this context, it is crucial to recognize that while Farhana Baji, Maryam Baji, and Abida had difficult lives, they did not see themselves as victims. Moreover, they saw Islam as a liberating and empowering force in their lives. Their narratives and actions force us to question stereotypes about Muslim women, and especially of those Muslim women who embrace rather than eschew practices of piety in their everyday lives.

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Notes

1 The research on which this manuscript is based was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the DePaul University Research Council. I am grateful to Nazima Parveen and Usha Sanyal for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. My thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their close reading of this piece, and to the SAMAJ team, Gayatri Menon, Mark Hauser, Lisa Knight, Shailja Sharma, and Amor Kohli for their editorial help.

2 Several scholars have critiqued representations of Islam as a totalizing and deterministic force (Said 1979; Asad 1986; Mamdani 2002), and one that is the primary source of Muslim women’s oppression (Ahmed 1992; Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002; Agnes 2012; Kirmani 2013; Abu Lughod 2013; Jamil 2018).

3 More commonly, mazlum, or victim of oppression.

4 This project was based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews and conversations with fifty men and fifty women from diverse backgrounds in Old Delhi, in addition to casual interactions with many others at homes, religious sites, and events. I spent a year in Old Delhi from 2012 to 2013, and have made multiple trips there since then.

5 All names are pseudonyms to protect the identity of those I worked with. In some cases, I have changed biographical details to further protect their identity. Baji means elder sister.

6 For more on the jinn who inhabit Delhi’s landscapes, see Taneja (2018). For jinn in other parts of South Asia, see Khan (2006).

7 For more on the BJP’s bulldozer politics, see Saikia, Chakravarty, and Sharma 2022.

8 The school itself was run by the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic reform movement founded in 1941 by Maulana Maududi, and committed to disseminating what it claims is “true” Islam. Although Abida was not a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, she was not averse to sending her children there for a basic Islamic education. For more on the Jamaat-e-Islami in India and its transformation in the postcolonial context from a movement committed to an Islamic state to one that embraced secularism and democracy, see Ahmad (2009).

9 This is a pseudonym.

10 For more on Islamic reform movements in South Asia, see Osella and Osella (2013).

11 The Muslim Club had a relatively small following in Old Delhi.

12 The term maslak is used to refer to the different schools of Islamic reform in South Asia, such as Barelvi, Ahl-e-Hadis, and Deobandi, and more specifically to what SherAli Tareen (2020) calls the “normative orientations” of each of these reform movements.

13 The four schools of law are Hanafi, Shafai, Hanbali, and Maliki.

14 For more on teachings that the Muslim Club found particularly important, see Menon (2022a:92–94).

15 For more on the remission of the sentences of the men convicted in the Bilkis Bano case, see: The Wire (2022) and The Wire (2024).

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References

Electronic reference

Kalyani Devaki Menon, Religion, Power, and Place: Three Muslim Women’s Stories in Old DelhiSouth Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 32 | 2024, Online since 20 January 2025, connection on 16 February 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/9573; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/136kh

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About the author

Kalyani Devaki Menon

DePaul University

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