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Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism
Barnes and Noble
Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism
Current price: $130.00
Barnes and Noble
Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism
Current price: $130.00
Size: Hardcover
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Lemons analyzes four marital dispute adjudication forums run by Muslim jurists or lay Muslims to show that religious law does not muddle the categories of religion and law but generates them. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in these four institutions—NGO-run women's arbitration centers (
); sharia courts (
); a Muslim jurist's authoritative legal opinions (
); and the practice of what a Muslim legal expert (
) calls "spiritual healing"—
shows how secularism is an ongoing project that seeks to establish and maintain an appropriate relationship between religion and politics. A secular state is always secularizing. And yet, as Lemons demonstrates, the state is not the only arbiter of the relationship between religion and law: religious legal forums help to constitute the categories of private and public, religious and secular upon which secularism relies. In the end, because Muslim legal expertise and practice are central to the Indian legal system and because Muslim divorce's contested legal status marks a crisis of the secular distinction between religion and law, Muslim divorce, argues Lemons, is a key site for understanding Indian secularism.