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How and where do religious minorities claim their rights? This book challenges abstract liberal approaches to minority rights and colonial constructions of the minority. It charts a new way of understanding minority rights based on an exploration of the everyday life of Muslim women's activism in Mumbai and its intersection with transnational feminist networks and a global politics of Islamic reform. It shows how women deploy everyday ideas of ethics and bodily practices to challenge inequality in Muslim family law. They construct a just community based upon the ethical ideals of the Quran and rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution and negotiate for rights within homes, police stations, and neighbourhoods in ghettoes. Everyday familiarity is interlaced with violence in women's interactions with the state and non-state actors as they claim their rights, and practices of ethics and intimate negotiations with processes of ghettoisation and violence shape the everyday life of rights.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Ethics: 1. Right to be righteous: constituting rights, travelling constitutions; 2. Becoming equals: gender equality as an ethical commitment; Part II. Spaces: 3. Remaking the ghetto: sites of resistance; 4. Estranged attachments: the carceral state and the everyday life of Muslim law; 5. Between the home and the world: the many publics of Muslim law; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Sagnik Dutta is Researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies, Tilburg University, and Associate Professor at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University. They were awarded the Gates Cambridge scholarship for their doctoral studies. They work on decolonial and postcolonial theory, minority citizenship, securitisation, and data justice. Their scholarship has appeared in several prominent peer-reviewed journals.
Summary
How do religious minorities claim their rights? Based on an exploration of Muslim women's activism for justice in the family in Mumbai, India, this book shows how rights claims are grounded in notions of everyday ethics and liberal categories, and are shaped by an intimate, conflictual relationship with a violent state.
Foreword
This book shows how minority rights inhere in lived religious, liberal, and transnational ethical ideals tied to an intimate, violent state.
