The need to be vigilant about unconscious prejudice and ill-formed stereotypes about Muslims is critical in today’s world, not least in India where Muslims comprise such a significant proportion of the citizenry and where tragic episodes of anti-Muslim violence have taken place since Independence in 1947.
Some recent reports have revealed perhaps startling indications of the extent to which Muslim Indians lag in relation to their fellow citizens in economic level, education, and representation in key public sectors as well as in management positions in private businesses.
Of these, the 2006 report of the Prime Minister’s Committee on the Social, Economic, and Education Status of Muslim Indians (or the Sachar Report, for Justice Rajinder Sachar who chaired it) is particularly important. Several studies by the Hyderabad-born, US-based, Omar Khalidi, including Indian Muslims since Independence (Vikas, 1995) and Khaki and Ethnic Violence in India (Threes Essays Collective, 2003) have highlighted the systematic exclusion of Muslims in India’s public services. A study by Delhi-based researchers Ritu Menon and Zoya Hasan, entitled Unequal Citizens: A Study of Muslim Women in India (Oxford University Press, 2004), similarly emphasized poverty and discrimination as causes of the ‘backwardness’ of the Muslim population as a whole. They demonstrated conclusively that the conventional wisdom that Islam is to blame for Muslim women’s problems was irrelevant compared to the impact of poverty.
Muslim Personal Law in relation to women is one of those red-flag issues that periodically surface to ‘confirm’ the unconscious assumption that Muslim citizens are not quite Indian, or Indian enough. Whatever the official secularism, the ‘real’ Indian is an upper-class, bourgeois Hindu. As colonial authorities did before them, today media and ordinary people alike obscure gender issues that affect women of their own community by focusing on those of others and believe that in so doing they have shown their own superiority.
http://newageislam.com/putting-indias-muslim-personal-law-in-perspective/islamic-sharia-laws/d/1573
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