Session 18:

Reading: Kecia Ali

 Tension between civil law and religious law in countries where muslims are minorities;

Reading: The Bride’s Voice

 Those women who view wedding rituals as place where they are made to feel invisible while
being in the bounds of Halakah/traditional marriage;
 Majorly, these women are working within bounds of traditional marriage;
 Don’t bring in a conceptual change/consistency/actionable rather than piecewise change in the
idea of marriage;
 These women don’t bring a conceptual change in understanding of marriage;
 Ritual, therefore, can become a powerful tool in bringing about visibility and therefore,
confrontation with the (traditional legal) structure of marriage;
 Orthodox women have started to destabilise in wedding rituals;
 Q. What are the STRATEGIES OF INTERPRETATION and action that these women are
exercising?
o Merely symbolic;
o Personal and invented meaning;
o Oppressive

^Page 5 of the reading

 Mehr: it is a symbolic act; you do it because it has a deeper meaning;

 Symbolic act -> give it newer meaning;
 Page 6 of pdf: Subversive in individual’s life, but also a way of reclaiming
 Meaning makening: how will someone view their husband who’s abusive but prays?
 Reclaim their dignity + body;
 Sadia Sheikh: vision of God -> important because we’re going to reject what we have in shape of
the husband;
 Not accessible in the fields of Tafsir
 Manifests itself in the person who breaks away from marriage;
 Page 7 last para: What about women who don’t have this kind of internal dialogue? The action IS
oppressive and offensive to them/ can’t tell themselves otherwise (THIRD STRATEGY);
o Take it heads on
o Refuse to do it as is taken by the Rabbis
o Nothing romantic about abuse
o View my visual performance as a way of demystifying the act of kiddushin
o Demystify, delegitimize and deconstruct

STRATEGIES OF ACTION

 What do you do with the acts to gain more visibility and reduce the visibility of the husband-to-
be?
o Creating a parallel ritual act
o Introducing variations on the ritual act
o Avoiding a parallel ritual act
o Employing legal resistance
o Ref: Page 9

Creating a Parallel Ritual Act

  How do you reclaim your own voice through ritual?
 Parallel table for themselves -> Parallel ritual
 Double Bedeken: reduce visibility of the man’s act
 Rabbi still managed to assert their domination
 At stake: the ritual itself
 View the veil as an attempt to make the women less visible;
 Uses analogy of burka (seen as tool of oppression) to show her distaste for the veil;
 Double Kiddushin: The woman cannot precisely mimic the groom in giving the ring, and she
cannot recite a parallel statement to the Kiddushin formula
 Kecia Ali: conceptually, marriage is an institution of male control even if you attempt to change
the contract
 Right to Divorce is GIVEN by the husband to the wife according to Pakistani constitution;
 Jewish weddings: Prenuptial agreements are supplementary to Kitubah
 Islamic: The right to divorce is not a God-given right, but given by the husband (unilateral right)
 Unilateral right is given by the man
 How women have to negotiate with religious authorities;

Parallel Act vs Perform one act differently:

 Kitubah and the variations in it

 Page 13
 Way to reclaim women’s voice and visibility
 Kecia Ali is bent towards making substantial and substantive change to flourish more egalitarian
marriages

Avoiding the Ritual Act

Judith Butler: Performity/Performance theory

o When you perform these acts in a different way (parody, imitation) -> never perfect
o Drag can never perfectly achieve that
o But how is it subversive?
o You’re bringing deep seated inequities
o Gender, then, becomes performance
o What is the man bringing to the table then? That gender is a construct
o Femininity is a learnt thing
o Prenuptial agreement is signed -> highly gender differentiated institution
o Power (premise) lies on the male institution
o Men do it -> in the ritual itself, you explain the inequities
o Constructed identities

Kecia Ali’s reading:

 On one hand, logical consistency is discussed;

 4 kinds of discussion:
1. Classical legal understanding of Marriage
o Page 3: new structure for egalitarian marriages...
o Based on patriarchal presumptions
o Example: When Pakistani Nikkah Nama got the clause for divorce, that was celebrated as
a success
o One way to see this: Legal reform -> granted a right to women to file for divorce
 o Kecia’s perspective: Divorce right has been granted, but there are no conceptual changes.
It still is the HUSBAND who GIVES the right, which enforces male domination in the
marriage
o Structurally, marriages are still dependent on male control
o Focused on changing elements of marriage, bit the structural changes themselves
o Reform, to Kecia Ali, is fully coherent structure
o Page 14: This linkage between…
o Page 22: The modern attempt to render…
o Page 31: Apologetic…Yet, there has not been a coherent alternative…
2. Conventional Discourses/Wisdom/Traditional Discourses + Conventional Contemporary
Discourse
3. Present/ Contemporary/ Social Practice/ Practical Impact
4. Quran and Hadith