Today is our Focus: THE IMRANA MALAISE RUNS MUCH DEEPER
THE IMRANA MALAISE RUNS MUCH DEEPER
Woe to those who write the Book with their own hands and then say, ‘This is from Allah’ to traffic with it for a miserable price! Woe to them for what their hands do write and for the gain they make thereby.
-Holy Quran 279
And yet it’s written every other day by those in the business of clergy and passed off as Allah’s word. The Holy Quran repeatedly decries such attempts to impose human opinions as laws of God. Still, the clergy is ever ready to issue decrees in the garb of ‘fatwa’ and make the lives of Muslims more and more complicated. There are innumerable examples where the clergy has gone out of its way to distort the laws in a manner that ensures male dominance and female subservience.
The Imrana case, or for that matter many other cases including the famous Shah Bano case, are merely symptoms of a much deeper malaise – the desire to maintain and perpetuate disparity between the sexes. In their zeal to achieve this, the clergy not only dispenses with all reason but ignores Quranic injunctions and teachings and insists what they dole our as ‘fatwas is not their personal opinion but law of God.
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (MPLB) since its inception has been a votary of this trend. Their role in the Shah Bano case bears ample testimony. Although after the Imrana verdict, some of their members have welcomed it, but as a body of clergy, the MPLB has kept silent. In fact, when a ‘fatwa’ was issued by Deoband, annulling Imrana’s marriage and asking her to marry the rapist, the MPLB’s silence was stonier.
To those who still respect the MPLB, the Board’s publication, Compendium of Islamic Laws, should be an eye-opener. Just check out how Islamic and humanitarian the provisions in it are. It’s important to remember that MPLB has described this Compendium as a compilation of Muslim personal law for reference and for the benefit of courts, judges and lawyers.
Part II. Chapter II, of the book deals with the subject of divorce It not only sanctions triple oral ‘talaq’ but also divorce written on a piece of paper or even on the wall without conveying the same to the wife All of this has been held valid and is described as ‘Kitabate Mustabinah Ghair Marsumah (p. 67)
Remember, in Islamic law marriage is a contract, and the implied condition of any contract is that no single party can take any unilateral decision without the knowledge of the other.
In another provision in the same chapter, the Muslim Personal Law Board’s Compendium of Islamic Laws says ‘for the effectiveness of ‘talaq’. it is in principle necessary that the man pronouncing it should be in his senses. This demands that ‘talaq’ pronounced in an inebriated condition should not be effective.’
But in succeeding sentence it is said, ‘However, if a person has unlawfully consumed an intoxicant by his own liking and habit, his ‘talaq’ will become effective by way of punishment. Curious logic, particularly when one knows that consumption of all liquor in Islam is forbidden and unlawful.
You could understand that if in the case of a liquor addict, the wife is given the option to divorce him by ‘khula’ But to say that divorce pronounced under the influence of drink will become effective ‘by way of punishment’ is being oblivious of Indian social realities where more than the husband, it’s the hapless wife who is likely to feel the punch of the ‘punishment’ given to an erring husband.
Then, Section 6 of the Chapter says, ‘If a person under compulsion or duress pronounces a talaq it will be valid if it is verbal, but not otherwise’ Here the cat is out of bag. Force is held to be the final arbiter. If somebody is compelled to pronounce divorce under duress, according to the MPLB it will be valid. And the Quran declares, “There is no compulsion in religion’ (2.256) The basic principle of Islamic jurisprudence is ‘Action depends on intention (Innamal Aamalu Binniyat). As you can see, the MPLB has ignored intention and instead given extraneous factors the sanction of legality.
This is not the end of the story. In fact, the climax is yet to come In sub-section (3) of Section 117 of Chapter 1, the Compendium says: Regard shall be had in respect of descent among the Arabs, especially the Quraish, and those non-Arab families who have preserved the descent Next, it says, ‘People in the rest of the non-Arab Muslim World are mutually equal. Further, it says, ‘On the basis of this principle, a girl can get terminated her marriage to a non-equal contracted by her guardian, and a guardian has the right to terminate the marriage of an adult woman to a non-equal.
In other words, this provision gives authority to a guardian of Arab origin to terminate the marriage of his adult daughter if he is of the view that she has married an unequal. He need not approach even the Qazi but can do so on his own. They have been given special right to decide about equality of status in marriage whereas the Muslims of non-Arab origin have been held to be mutually equal.
The implication is clear Muslims of Arab origin are more equal than others. Since the leadership of the MPLB consists mostly of those who claim Arab origin, this is how they wish to stop marriages between Muslims of Arab and non-Arab origin.
Consider this in the light of the basic Islamic principle of equality of all human beings. To prove the point, the Prophet prevailed upon his family, and despite their resistance, gave his first cousin in marriage to a man who was a freed slave.
Cases like Imrana and Shah Bano will keep happening because the MPLB is promoting a value system that is not rooted in Islamic principles but Arab tribal arrogance. The right to freedom of religion under Indian Constitution is guaranteed to each and every individual. But the Constitution does not provide any license to a group of persons, howsoever eminent, to become the arbiters of the religious faith of a community.
If we do not wish Imrana and Shah Bano to be repeated then there is urgent need to at least discourage organisations like MPLB and give them no respectability and thus help the community, in the words of the Quran, to free from their heavy burdens and from the yokes that are upon them’ (7 157).
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