TY - JOUR AU - Tschalaer, Mengia Hong PY - 2015/12/01 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Competing Model–Nikahnamas: Muslim Women’s Spaces within the Legal Landscape in Lucknow1 JF - NAVEIÑ REET: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research JA - nnjlsr VL - 0 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - 10.7146/nnjlsr.v0i3.111106 UR - https://tidsskrift.dk/nnjlsr/article/view/111106 SP - 65-80 AB - <p>This paper delineates the growing women’s spaces within the legally pluralistic&nbsp;landscape of postcolonial India. Based on empirical data gathered in the city of&nbsp;Lucknow, Northern India, it explores the ways in which (i) Muslim women’s&nbsp;activists seek to carve out space for the creation of gender-just laws within a&nbsp;religious framework, and (ii) how within these women’s legal spaces, orthodox&nbsp;demarcations between secular and religious practice and legal authority become&nbsp;blurred. At the centre of my analysis are two women-friendly versions of the&nbsp;nikahnama (marriage contract), which stipulate conjugal rights and duties as&nbsp;well as conditions of divorce and financial support. This paper will contextualise&nbsp;and analyse these counter-hegemonic voices that address matrimonial rights -&nbsp;brought forth by two ideologically different Muslim women’s organisations in&nbsp;Lucknow. In so doing, this paper challenges simplified modernist accounts that&nbsp;depict secular conceptions of state law as incompatible with non-state religious&nbsp;law and norms. Conversely, this paper will demonstrate that current attempts by&nbsp;Muslim women’s rights activists to formulate gender-justice within the domestic&nbsp;sphere in fact, contribute to an emerging legal landscape of interlegality (Santos&nbsp;1987/2002) - a field characterised by legal entanglements rather than parallel&nbsp;systems of law and morals.</p> ER -