Introduction

This chapter investigates the placing of Shariat in the postcolonial Muslim politi­cal discourse. It explores the manners in which constitutionally granted minority rights are identified as potential sources for articulating political arguments and positions.

(a) What are the forms in which Shariat is represented as a ‘political issue’?

(b) How do these varied political forms draw legal-constitutional legitimacy?

To offer an empirical background to these abstract questions, the chapter closely looks at two crucial postcolonial debates — the debate on the legality of personal laws, which emerged in the 1970s (when the Adoption Bill was introduced in the Parliament and which eventually led to the formation of the Muslim Personal Law Board in 1972) and the debate on inclusiveness of Shariat that came up dur­ing the Shah Bano divorce and maintenance case controversy in 1985—86 (which reopened the issue of Uniform Civil Code).

The chapter does not offer any structured argument. Instead, I make an effort to trace various meanings of Shariat and their complex relationship with polit­ico-legal debates. In this sense, certain politically correct positions on the rights of women, the progressive or regressive nature of Islam and the divinity of Muslim Personal Law are intentionally avoided simply to get rid of the secular/com- munal binary. In contrast, an interpretative excise is made to go beyond the known meanings and definitions of Shariat to highlight certain very preliminary inferences.

Two crucial clarifications are important here. I briefly trace the ‘past’ of the process by which certain ideas and practices are transformed into a legally codified entity called personal laws in the specific context of South Asia. This is not a history of Shariat; rather it is a conscious attempt to historicize a few ‘second order political questions.’² The story of the Quran, the nature of political belongingness in pre­British India, and the relationship between historical writings and legalisation of the Quran as the main source of Islamic law are invoked very sketchily to address the issues that emerged in the postcolonial period.

My second clarification is about the sources, which I employ to construct a plausible narrative. For this purpose, I look at the recent historical research, parliamentary debates, legal documents and the publications of the AIMPLB, particularly the texts published in Urdu. These varied sources are put together to offer a sequence to this exploration. In my view, these texts directly address two peoples — the Indian state/political class and Muslim communities to make certain strong historical claims about Shariat and its unsettled sacredness.

II.