Love in the Time of Corona

SHARIA LAW, SHAH BANO VERDICT AND THE INDIAN MUSLIM WOMEN INTRODUCTION Since the inception of human collectives, some rudimentary form of legal principles and law has existed   to protect the community, not just from external threats but also to ensure the well being and security of its members and to deal with them, if they cause any harm to each other. Once society developed, and Religion was introduced, it became the source which established the principles on which, the way of life of an individual was to be determined and how society was supposed to deal with any violations of the natural or religious laws. The grip and rules of religion, thus differs from region to region and community to community.   To understand the personal laws of Muslims, i.e. the Sharia, it is important to understand the conditions and context in which Prophet Mohammad led to the birth of Islam and how the society at that time interpreted it. Historically Arabia was a land of tribes, n...

It has hardly been 200 hundred years since women started raising voices against the subjugation and violation they had been suffering at the hands of men, society and patriarchy. What started in the 1800s  with a demand for equal voting rights in the West was coincided with the social reform movements, particularly aimed at the plights of women, being carried out in the Indian subcontinent. The reforms were initiated by Men, later on joined by women from upper castes and upper class families and  backed  by legal authority the British Government in India. And since then, women and men have time and again started movements against evils and inequalities of the society. As put forward by Krishna Menon and Meenakshi Malhotra, Women’s politics involves two aspects- one that of their participation in what we call ‘political’ and the other refers to their understanding of the politics of their own oppression. Feminists scholars had made the public-private dichotomy very clea...