Talaq: War cry of the victim

Their faces proclaim their predicament. Women of varying ages united by a common tragedy: each is an abandoned wife, cast away by a Muslim male exercising his 'religious' privilege to divorce.

After suffering in silence for decades, these women have finally found their voice. Some weeks ago, on June 16, 1997, talaq victims gathered at Manjeri in the Muslim-dominated Malappuram district in Kerala and founded Nisah, an organisation pledged to fight for the rights of oppressed Muslim women.

They inhabit the coastal belt to Malabar in north Kerala where female exploitation in the name of the Shariat is most acute. Nisah has its headquarters in Kozhikode, where the beaches are dotted by slum colonies teeming with discarded wives. The men are fish mongers or saw mill workers. The women work as maids in middle-class homes in the city. Tap water and electrification seldom exist in these colonies. The eyesores of a landscape scarred by poverty are all there: exposed sewers, the mad scramble of buckets around the occasional community tap, children defecating in the open.

More insidious than the rigours of poverty is the lure of obscurantism among the hungry and the desolate. Here the Shariat becomes an instrument of whim in the hands of callous men. Here Mohammedan law turns into a legitimate means of female oppression.

House after house harbours broken women peering out of the dark interior, victims of male brutalisation haunted by ugly memories. Women compelled into marriage at adolescence and discarded soon after, or after years of menial domestic subjugation, stranded penniless. Ever so often the man scamps off with his wife's jewels after seeing up a small business with the dowry money she has paid him. Or simply abandons her for a younger woman.These are men who turn the Shariat into an adventure in exploitation, going from one marriage to another with impunity, leaving a trail of shattered lives.

The forces of orthodoxy represented by the local mosque committees, the religious scholars or Ulema and the Muslim political leadership have abetted the exploitation of women by ignoring the rampant abuse of the Shariat laws. This has left the victims too weak-willed to fight back for fear of social and religious sanctions. Recourse to the law is not a viable option. Most of the afflicted women are either too poor to afford legal redress or simply have no access to legal aid services.

But awareness has been steadily growing. In the past, Muslim women from the poorer sections have paraded the streets of Kozhikode in protest against this exploitation in the name of religion. In a rare show of solidarity, Muslim women in secure and affluent circumstances have marched with placards denouncing the marriage and divorce laws that discriminate against females. These sporadic protests failed to coalesce into any organised movement.

That opportunity may have presented itself with the formation of Nisah, a nascent solidarity movement committed to the emancipation of Muslim women. Nisah, which means woman in Arabic, took shape in the aftermath of a tumultuous seminar organised by the Kerala Women's Commission in Kozhikode in June to discuss the problems faced by Muslim women. The hardcore conservative lobby, represented at the seminar by the Jamait-i-Islami and the Muslim League, turned militant when talaq victims stroke up to the podium and aired their grievances. The meeting broke up in bedlam, but it had provided a forum for Muslim divorcees to focus attention on their predicament.

One of the speakers was V P Suhara, a talaq victim and the prime motivator behind Nisah. Her tale of woe is typical of such divorcees. She was married off by her parents at the age of 14 and was divorced within four years. Her husband sent her back to her parents without saying why. She bore him two children.

Suhara was forced to marry again, this time the man was 20 years older and with ten children. The marriage lasted, till her husband's death eleven years ago. Since then she has been a widow. She has a son from this marriage. Suhara immersed herself in social work, interacting with other abandoned wives and their children.

Nisah focuses especially on the children of talaq victims. Orphanages and children's homes are crammed with inmates fathered by Muslim men who divorced their wives and whose children are not welcome in the new homes. And because their own mothers are not able to maintain them, many of the children go vagrant. The juvenile wing of the police picks up truant children from railway stations and bus stops and whisks them off to children's courts. Orphanages often refuse to admit such children on the grounds that their fathers are not deceased.

Nisah aims to build awareness among poor, illiterate Muslim women and eventually eradicate some of the more heinous practices that they are subjected to. A case in point is Chadangu vivaham or ritual remarriage, whereby a divorced couple seeking to re-unite can do so only after the girl remarries, has conjugal relations with her new husband and is then divorced by him. ''These practices are not prescribed by the Shariat but occur under Muslim Personal Law," Suhara told Rediff On The NeT.

This distinction between the Shariat and the Personal Laws is the point of contention for the warring sides. Says advocate Ananda Kanakam, a member of the advisory board of Nisah who works with talaq victims, "Nisah is not opposed to the Shariat. It seeks changes in the Muslim Personal Law which deviates from the Shariat." That is, both the radicals and the conservatives uphold the Shariat, saying that the Muslim system of marriage and divorce does not discriminate against women.

Conservatives like the Muslim League regard the Shariat and the personal law as synonymous. But Nisah's objectives include reforms of the personal law on the questions of polygamy, child marriage and divorce. It wants divorce to be brought under the purview of the family courts.

Clearly, the Muslim community is in a state of ferment. The forces of orthodoxy are being challenged by a hitherto mute section. Muslim women have issued notice to their male oppressors.

'My mother never considered my feelings'