Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum

"We think it cruel that though she was in her seventies, that though she was indigent, that though she had been married to her husband for forty-five years and had borne him five children, the ulema insisted that Shah Bano was not entitled to any maintenance at all once her prosperous lawyer of a husband threw her out by uttering one word—’talaq’. But it is the Prophet who declared in case after case that the divorced woman is entitled to no maintenance."

"But it would be a job done only in half if the ulema stopped at ‘defending’ the shariah. For as we have seen their power rests not only on the shariah, but on the shariah remaining ambiguous and uncodified. The sequel to their victory on the Shah Bano campaign illustrates how resourcefully the ulema guard this source of their power as well. Tahir Mahmood who was much involved in the negotiations over the bill to overturn the Shah Bano verdict, later reported: During the campaign for this Act leaders of the Muslim community had agreed to get prepared by experts a comprehensive draft-code of Muslim law for the country, to be submitted to Parliament for enactment. A committee of theologians and legal practitioners was appointed in 1987 for this purpose by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. Until now the committee having its headquarters at Phulwari Sharief near Patna in Bihar could, however, do nothing more than producing a few booklets in Urdu detailing the principles of Hanafi law—ignoring the fact that what they have come out with is far from being a draft-Code and that in a country where followers of at least four different schools of Muslim law (Hanafi, Shafi’i, Ja’fari and Isma’ili) live, Hanafi law can never be accepted as the only legal code for the entire community. Theirs has been an exercise in futility—while in the absence of any Code worth the name, the courts and other interpreters and appliers of the law continue to rely on unauthentic, sometimes faulty, textbooks and recorded precedents..."

"The result? Even the most inhumane accretions to what was already the heavily skewed world view of the Prophet’s time cannot be touched, simply because a society accustomed to inequity and the domination of males ensured that such humane possibilities as there might have been in some pronouncements of the Quran or the Prophet were not enforced in the past. And every attempt to enforce them— by the Supreme Court in the Shah Bano case in regard to maintenance, by Justice Tilhari in the matter of the ‘Triple Divorce’—is denounced as an assault on Islam."

"The classic example given is the Shah Bano case of 1985: repudiated by her husband, the Muslim woman Shah Bano went to court to force him to pay alimony, which Islamic law forbids; the Supreme Court upheld her claim on the basis of equality before the law (Hindu women would have the right to alimony in her case), but under Muslim pressure, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress Government voted a law overruling the verdict and reaffirming the Islamic rules on divorce, at least for Muslims."

"To create a negative image, to manufacture stereotypes and biases against the minorities, a large network of trained people, owing allegiance to Hindu nationalism have spread far and wide, deep into the vitals of society. [...] The provocation and justification for the aggression at level of ideas was provided by Shah Bano blunder by a section of Muslim leadership. After this there was no looking back and all the medieval history was used to demonise the Muslims of today. The additions to the list of stereotypes were fast and furious. Love "jihad", and cow protection mobs came in, and each served to undermine the Muslim identity and marginalise the community, while the graph of violence saw a parallel rise. The outcome was ghettoisation or seclusion of the minorities, among whom insecurity grew and threw its members further into the arms of maulanas with their rigid pronouncements about Islam. These maulanas and their teachings is what a section of the media uses to characterise the whole community. The moderate Muslims, the ones trying to articulate humane values, have been pushed to the margin."

"In a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court dismissed Mohd Ahmed Khan’s appeal and directed him to pay maintenance to his ex-wife as laid down by the high court’ Does the Muslim Personal Law’, asked the court, ‘impose no obligation upon the husband to provide for the maintenance of his divorced wife? Undoubtedly, the Muslim husband enjoys the privilege of being able to discard his wife whenever he chooses to do so, for reasons good, bad, or indifferent. Indeed, for no reason at all. It is a matter of deep regret that some of the interveners who supported the husband, took up an extreme position by displaying an unwarranted zeal to defeat the right to maintenance of women who are unable to maintain themselves.’"