Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism by Katherine Lemons (review)

Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism is a masterful ethnographic voyage into multiple sites of law that impact divorcing minority Muslims in Delhi, India. Katherine Lemons's ethnography includes two Hanafi-based dar ul-qazas (non-state Islamic legal institutions), a women's council, a fatwa-granting office and a Sufi healing practice. Divorce serves as a generative site to consider the secular Indian state's interaction with personal and Islamic law and gender politics. As Lemons demonstrates, divorce represents a major economic and financial rupture for women, their kin, their community and the state. Talaq ul-ba'in (unilateral divorce by men, also known as triple talaq) raises particular anxieties.

Before turning to the specifics of Lemons's ethnography, I note Divorcing Traditions' significant contributions to secularism studies. First, Lemons focuses on contemporary India, a context that has received insufficient attention in the English-language literature. Second, Lemons shows the centrality of kinship to secular governance, particularly in how the secular government renders marriage (and divorce) as familial, private and religious. Third, Lemons argues that "Indian secularism brings into question the assumed centrality of the state to secularism" (26). At first glance, qazis (judges) and muftis (jurists) appear as religious actors and therefore separate from the state, but they too engage in articulating secularism. Finally, Lemons contends that Indian secularism relies on the minority status of Muslims. Religious divorce for Indian Muslim minorities thus renders their religiosity as "the mark of inassimilable difference and an instrument for securing the ostensibly private family as the source of financial support and care" (64). This entrenchment of minority difference means that interreligious solidarity in India is impeded.

The book's first section, focused on the state, introduces how family disputes among Indian Muslims in Delhi most often involve consultation with a religious legal scholar rather than state court or the registration of complaints with police. In addition to their religious authority – judgments are presented as binding in the eyes of God – dar ul-qazas (Islamic law courts) are local and often offer free consultation with fewer intermediaries. Again, while imagined as separate from state legal adjudication and jurisprudence, Lemons shows how dar ul-qazas are entangled with the state. The second chapter examines divorce through the lens of a mahila panchayat, an NGO-run women's council that offers mediation for couples. This space is not part of the state's formal legal apparatus but draws on legislation on domestic violence as it draws up contracts. Lemons beautifully captures the tension laden in the advice granted by the council, insofar as it typically offers a "pragmatic response to conditions of poverty [for women following divorce] on the one hand, and on the other, the importance of living out one's desires" (52).

The second section turns to Lemons's observations of hearings and case files at two shari'a courts in two predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods in Delhi. These courts are especially effective in rendering the family as private and as best governed by religious norms. Because of the patriarchal talaq, women typically bring forward cases seeking divorce. Lemons offers a feminist analysis in considering how the qazis do not spend much time on allegations of violence and notes that the broader tone encourages litigants to reconcile. Ultimately, the "family values" undergirding the cases she examines "privilege a view of women as wives to be protected by marriage [within an] affinal family" (91). Similarly, she notes how the financial and custody arrangements of divorce are addressed in fatwas only if explicitly raised in the request. Around since Independence and protected by laws promoting the freedom of religion, alternate dispute resolution is a key part of the "ideological fiction" of the Indian secular state (101), which Chapter 4 highlights. In actively situating kinship as religiously based, the dar ul-qazas reinforce the notion that problems of property and finances are outside state jurisdiction.

The third section describes muftis who...