Muslim Women’s Haji Ali Movement in Mumbai: Reimagining Feminism and Piety in Islam

Esita Sur

doi:10.20896/saci.v8i2.845

Abstract

Muslim women’s engagement with Islam through Haji Ali Movement in Mumbai highlights an interesting as well as conflicting encounters between Islam, feminism, and women’s rights. It not only disturbs the quintessential images of them but also opens up an array of possibilities to comprehend that Muslim women can develop their own critique of religion and cultural practices from within. The study argues that the Muslim women’s Haji Ali movement or the mosque movement offers a surprising trade-off between Islam, feminism, and women’s rights by challenging the long-established idea that these are mutually exclusive entities and the distance cannot be bridged. Therefore, the study not only tries to find out the origin, nature, and unique characteristics of the movement but also the new ways of exploring the dialogue between Muslim women’s religious subjectivity, rights, and feminism in India.

Highlights

The city of dreams—Mumbai (Maharashtra) had witnessed a new kind of mobilisation by Muslim women— the Haji Ali Movement
The emerging Muslim women’s movement and Haji Ali movement in India highlights a new type of Islamic feminism where exegesis (interpretations of the Quranic verses by the Islamic feminist scholars like Amina Wadud (1999), Omaima Abu Bakr (2017) and Asra Nomani (2016) is secondary, but by taking help from these interpretations, the Muslim women activists have brought up the relationship between Islam and women’s rights in public
While the Muslim women activists critique an Islamic practice from within the religious framework, is it religious or secular? How do we look at the role of this critique based on reason in the Indian feminist activism context? While in the Islamic countries, the conflict between Islam and West becomes very visible, in India dynamics of rising right-wing forces and histories of communal violence have made the journey of Islamic feminism more difficult, as the feeling of insecure minority identity acts as another deterrent in mobilising Muslim women

Summary

Introduction

The city of dreams—Mumbai (Maharashtra) had witnessed a new kind of mobilisation by Muslim women— the Haji Ali Movement. While coming back to India and Muslim women’s Haji Ali Movement, based on my five years of empirical study on Muslim women’s activism in Mumbai, the notion of Muslim women’s religious-critical agency becomes more appropriate in the Indian context.

Results

Conclusion