Zakia Soman’s scientific contributions

The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), a Muslim women-led organization, has recently supported the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India. This step by the BMMA has added a new dimension to the debate on reforms in personal laws, especially the Muslim Personal Law (MPL). More specifically, it signifies a shift in the BMMA’s position. Since its inception in 2007, the BMMA has been advocating for the codification of MPL along the lines of Hindu Law, which was enacted in 1956. In fact, this was one of the reasons behind their emergence as a Muslim women-led group aiming to assert the constitutional rights of Indian Muslim women within the framework of Islamic law and the Quran, without the Muslim women having to give up their religious identity and practices. However, the support for a uniform law for all, which may result in the abrogation of MPL or the community’s right to govern civil matters by religious codes, is a critical step in this regard. Thus, it is important to understand the ideological foundation, priorities and strategies of the BMMA in the current political moment, especially when the problematic implementation of the Triple Talaq Law, 2019, passed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its interaction with MPL has already made the issue complicated (Parveen, this issue). The conversation with Zakia Soman is an attempt to document the shifts in the BMMA’s position and to bring it into the academic discourse for understanding how Muslim women’s organizations and groups negotiate and strategize their relationship with the state under different political regimes. And to raise a basic question: Do these efforts create a “third space” in which Muslim women are engaged in redefining their identities and reformulating relations of power?