The Materiality of Everyday Islamic law

October 23, 2025

In the preceding essay, I explored how rukhsati cases at the dar ul-qaza (Sharīʿa Court) of the Imarat-e-Sharia illuminate the dynamics of legal change from below. I argued that women's dissatisfaction with their marriages has, in practice, become a recognizable basis for divorce—showing how everyday legal actions can shape institutional norms. Notably, unlike in Lawrence Rosen's now classic example of qāḍī courts in Morocco, this change does not reflect dominant cultural norms.[1] Women's agency, in this context, is not an epiphenomenon of symbolic minority politics but a driving force in the production of Islamic legal authority.

This final essay pushes that argument further by foregrounding the material conditions that animate Islamic legal practice in India. If we take seriously the everyday motivations of women who turn to the dar ul-qaza for resolution of marital discord, it becomes clear that minority politics is not only—or even primarily—about recognition or identity. Rather, it is about seeking redress for concrete experiences of dispossession, violence, and economic vulnerability. Islamic law, in these moments, is not a symbolic marker of community but a mechanism for navigating the constraints of everyday life.

This dynamic is not unique to India. A wide body of scholarship has shown that qazi courts across the Muslim world are often perceived as "women's courts"—tribunals where women are often the primary claimants and the recipients of favorable judgments. Whether in coastal Kenya,[2] Zanzibar,[3] Iran,[4] Malaysia,[5] or India,[6] women turn to these non-state tribunals to resolve disputes that state courts do not or will not address. For the women who approach them, qazi courts are laced with ambivalence. Women do not always get what they believe they deserve, and these courts do not necessarily challenge patriarchal norms. But they do offer something else—a forum for struggle and, in some cases, a concrete remedy.

Take the case of Mahua. Mahua was the third of six children, and the second oldest daughter. Her elder brother was the only member of the family who worked for wages because her father was disabled and her mother's ill health prevented her from working. Mahua was illiterate. At age 15, Mahua married a 25-year-old bangle-maker. She initially believed she would find stability through marriage. But according to my discussions with Mahua and her mother, within a few years, her husband became addicted to drugs and began to physically abuse her.[7]

When Mahua's mother learned of the abuse, she first turned to a local tribunal called a panchayat. When that failed to help, Mahua's mother filed a case in a district court. The judge issued an order directing her husband to improve his behavior, but the abuse continued. Eventually, the mother brought Mahua to the Imarat-e-Sharia, encouraged by the story of another woman who had received a divorce and financial compensation from the dar ul-qaza.

By August 2018, after three hearings and considerable negotiation, Mahua was granted a khulaʿ divorce. In exchange, she agreed to forgo her mahr (money or property promised to women by their in-laws at the time of marriage) and iddat kharch (the maintenance owed for the three months following divorce). Her husband gave INR 60,000 (about 690 USD) to Mahua's family in the presence of the qazi.[8] This money compensated the family for some of the household items and other gifts the couple had received at the time of the marriage.

As with many such cases, domestic violence was the primary grounds for divorce. But equally important were the material and moral expectations associated with the marriage contract. The husband's failure to provide—not only emotional support but basic financial stability—was viewed as a breach of both ethical and legal obligations. In the dar ul-qaza, these failings were not framed merely in economic terms but as violations of the moral structure of marriage, which assumes a husband's responsibility to materially support his wife.[9]

Still, the financial outcome left both Mahua and her mother dissatisfied. For her mother, the modest settlement made future remarriage, which she felt was her daughter's best hope for stability, less likely. For Mahua's mother, then, compensation was not just restitution—it was a form of social capital, a way to restore her daughter's marriageability and, perhaps, security.[10]

Mahua, by contrast, concluded the interview with a different vision: she wanted to learn to sew. "To live with dignity," she said, "one must have some skills."[11] Her statement points to a recurring theme I have encountered: the association between women's agency and remunerated labor. Earning a wage, for women like Mahua, is not only a means of survival; it is a condition of dignity. As Nadia Hussain and I have argued elsewhere,[12] this connection between remunerated labor and dignity is increasingly visible in legal disputes in the dar ul-qaza, where women challenge not only abusive husbands but the expectation that they remain economically dependent.

For example, Ruksana sought divorce after a prolonged conflict with her in-laws and husband over her desire to work outside the home.[13] Her case reflects the deep tensions between the normative expectations of domestic femininity and the material exigencies of urban poverty. For Ruksana, the prohibition on waged labour was not only a frustrating family norm. It was an ethical affront and a practical impossibility. The dar ul-qaza offered her a setting to openly contest these constraints.

What Mahua and Ruksana show us is that the dar ul-qaza is a forum in which the Ḥanafī legal tradition remains dynamic through its practice. But it is also more than this. It is a forum in which women engage with competing claims of obligation, kinship, dignity, and survival. The qazis who adjudicate these cases are not feminist reformers, but they are attentive to women's struggles. Their rulings attempt to mediate between Islamic legal norms and the lived realities of poverty, violence, and social precarity.

These cases illustrate how and why a focus on the everyday adjudication of Islamic law complicates dominant accounts of minority politics. Much of the scholarship on religious family law in India and elsewhere has focused on its symbolic role—as a marker of community identity jealously guarded by the ʿulamāʾ, often at the expense of women's well-being. Scholars such as Saba Mahmood and Aamir Mufti, among others, have shown how the politics of recognition can consolidate structures of inequality.[14] But for the women who bring cases to the dar ul-qaza, Islamic law is more than a symbol of community autonomy. It is a resource—an imperfect one to be sure, but often the most accessible. Their struggles take place not in the realm of legal abstraction or polemical efforts to maintain jurisdictional boundaries but in the dense terrain between two patriarchal institutions: marriage and the market.

The dar ul-qaza does not resolve the contradictions of either institution. It does, however, offer a space in which women can pursue a degree of redress, whether in the form of divorce, compensation, or recognition of harm. And the dar ul-qaza's appeal to women animates the ʿulamāʾ's effort to build institutions that serve Muslims both symbolically and materially.

The fact that dar ul-qazas only adjudicate cases that pertain to family law, sometimes dismissed as "garbage cases,"[15] does not diminish their significance. Rather, it reveals how legal practice in this domain becomes a critical site of ethical and political life.

The women who bring cases to the dar ul-qaza do not necessarily come out of piety, and certainly not in a search for state recognition. They come to make claims. And, inasmuch as the dar ul-qaza is a site at which women struggle with their circumstances and narrate their efforts to secure what one of my interlocutors repeatedly referred to as "a decent life,"[16] they bring into view both the power relations and material conditions that a substantial minority politics must address. In so-doing, they show us one way that everyday Islamic legal practices participate in such a political project—one we might call postcolonial worldmaking.

Acknowledgments: The research on which these essays are based was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. I am grateful to Nadia Hussain and Abdul Majeed Peedikayil for their excellent research assistance.

Notes:

[1] Lawrence Rosen, "Equity and Discretion in a Modern Islamic Legal System," Law & Society Review 15, no. 2 (1980): 217–45.

[2] Susan F. Hirsch, Pronouncing & Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

[3] Erin E. Stiles, An Islamic Court in Context: An Ethnographic Study of Judicial Reasoning (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

[4] Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law: Iran and Morocco Compared (I.B. Tauris, 1993).

[5] Michael G. Peletz, Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton University Press, 2018),

[6] Katherine Lemons, Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism (Cornell University Press, 2019).

[7] Interview conducted by Nadia Hussain (research assistant), 2019. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee.

[8] Private case 1L observed by Nadia Hussain in 2018. Researcher numbered and anonymized to protect the privacy of litigants.

[9] Private cases 1L and 21 observed by Nadia Hussain in 2018. Researcher numbered and anonymized to protect the privacy of litigants.

[10] Interview conducted with Nadia Hussain, research assistant, 2019. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee.

[11] Interview conducted with Nadia Hussain, research assistant, 2019. Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee.

[12] Katherine Lemons and Nadia Hussain, "The Ends of Divorce: Marital Dispute as a Locus of Social Change in India," in Islamic Divorce in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective, ed. Erin Styles et al (Rutgers University Press, 2022), 187–203.

[13] Lemons and Hussain, "The Ends of Divorce," 187–203.

[14] Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press, 2016), 22; Aamir R. Mufti, "Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique," Social Text 45 (1995): 84.

[15] Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 14.

[16] Lemons and Hussain, "The Ends of Divorce," 187–203.

Suggested Bluebook citation: Katherine Lemons, The Materiality of Everyday Islamic Law, Islamic Law Blog (Oct. 23, 2025), https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/10/23/the-materiality-of-everyday-islamic-law/.

Suggested Chicago citation: Katherine Lemons, "The Materiality of Everyday Islamic Law," Islamic Law Blog, October 23, 2025, https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/10/23/the-materiality-of-everyday-islamic-law/.