Justice as Righteous Duty: Notes from an Islamic Feminist Movement in India

The question of gender justice vis-à-vis minority religious communities has been understood in liberal political theory either in terms of the discourse of multiculturalism and the preservation of a cultural identity or in terms of the accommodation of religious reasons by universal liberal categories of freedom, equality, and autonomy. This paper instead illuminates the female religious subject’s constitution of a vocabulary of rights using a category of moral agency. It illustrates the imbrication of a discourse of rights by ideas of everyday justice forged in a site of negotiation between the normative and the contingent. Building upon participant observation in the training sessions of a movement for gender justice by Muslim women in Mumbai inspired by a global discourse of Islamic feminism, this article argues for a new way of thinking about justice vis-à-vis the minority identity that escapes the ethnocentrism of universal liberal categories while arguing for a rethinking of identity as an entry point into rights discourses.