Sharia and Shah Bano: Multiculturalism and Women's Rights
Keywords:
multiculturalism, personal laws, women's rights, cultural rightsAbstract
This article is a comparative examination of the 2005
sharia controversy surrounding the establishment of faith-based
arbitration in Ontario, Canada, and a similar controversy in India
after the 1985 Supreme Court Ruling favouring the claim of Shah
Bano, a Muslim woman who challenged her husband in court for
extended maintenance in contravention of Muslim Personal Law.
I use the two controversies to interrogate the contentious issue
of group rights and women's rights with particular reference to
religious-based personal laws. The two cases demonstrate the
patriarchal aspects of personal laws in the private and public
realms and their politicization in the public realm. They also
underscore the limits of multiculturalism in its potential to deal
with the impacts of multicultural accommodation of group rights
on the equality rights of women within these groups. My paper
emphasizes the need to move beyond multiculturalism and high-
lights the strategic importance of mainstreaming feminist citi-
zenship and human rights discourses into legal norms and practices relating to family law issues in multicultural societies.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2011 Amali Philips
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors contributing to Anthropologica agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
