An Unlikely Champion of Women’s Rights under Muslim Personal Law

Mawdūdi on the Anglo-Muhammadan Law

  • Shahbaz Cheema University Law College, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32350/jitc.92.03
Keywords: personal law, women’s rights, Mawdūdi, Anglo-Muhammadan Law, British Rāj

Abstract

Abstract Views: 202

Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdūdi was one of the most renowned Muslim scholars of the 20th century. In addition to his portrayal as a gender insensitive / women unfriendly scholar, he is regarded as one of the founding fathers of political Islam in the modern era for developing a comprehensive political theory of Islam. Mawdūdi was a prolific writer who wrote on a wide array of subjects, although there are some areas in which his contributions have never attracted the academic attention they deserve. With this background, this paper analyzes Mawdūdi’s book Huquq al-Zawjayn written during the British Rāj which has generated debates in the post-colonial legal landscape of Pakistan about some important issues related to women’s rights in marriage. Mawdūdi expressed unflinching disapproval of his contemporary Muslim scholars for their parasitic imitation of the rules of fiqh and their hesitation to have recourse to the divine sources, that is, Qur’ān and Sunnah for ushering solutions of then prevalent religious and social vices. Additionally, he criticized sternly the British Raj and the byproduct of its legal apparatus in the domain of family law, that is, the Anglo-Muhammadan law. Consequently, Mawdūdi presented a model for Muslim personal law inspired by and reconstructed from Qur’ānic verses and sayings of the Holy Prophet (SAW).
Keywords: , , , ,

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Abbasi, Muhammad Zubair. “Judicial Ijtihād as a Tool for Legal Reform: Extending Women’s Right to Divorce under Islamic Law in Pakistan.” Islamic Law and Society 24, (2017): 384-411. Abbasi, Muhammad Zubair, and Shahbaz Ahmad Cheema. Family Laws in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Anderson, Michel R. Islamic Law and Colonial Encounter in British India. Occasional Paper 7. Women Living Under Muslim Laws. Available at http://www.wluml.org/node/5627.
Baillie, N. B. E. A Digest of Moohummudan Law. London: Smith Elder and Co., 1875.
Cheema, Shahbaz Ahmad. “Problematizing ‘Authenticity’: A Critical Appraisal of the Jamaat-i-Islami Gender Discourse.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2011.
Cheema, Shahbaz Ahmad., and Samee Ozair Khan. “Genealogical Analysis of Islamic Law Books Relied on in the Courts of Pakistan.” Al-Adwa (December 2013): 23-36.
Cheema, Shahbaz Ahmad. “The Concept of Qawama: A Study of Interpretive Tensions.” Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 2, no. 2-3 (2014): 235-251.
Fyzee, A.A.A. Cases in the Muhammadan Law of India and Pakistan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
Published
2019-12-18
How to Cite
Shahbaz Cheema. 2019. “An Unlikely Champion of Women’s Rights under Muslim Personal Law”. Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization 9 (2), 37-64. https://doi.org/10.32350/jitc.92.03.
Issue
Vol 9 No 2: Fall 2019
Section
Articles

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.