In 2024, the Supreme Court of India noted that what is primary in the determination of the minority character of an institution is not the “existence of a religious place for prayer and worship” or “the existence of religious symbols” but the objective of providing “benefit” to “a religious or linguistic minority community”. This means that “educational institutions could be established for minorities to provide secular education without imparting any lessons on religion”. A secularized understanding of minority status is important as it dispels the ideology of minority communalism that links the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) to the preservation of religious sanctimony.
Women Are Not Vessels of Culture
Two law graduates of AMU, who also happen to be practicing advocates, believe that the minority status of the institution is crucial because it enables women to be the glorious carriers of culture. In their words: “The responsibility of bearing the cultural identity, be it a majority or a minority, also falls on women. When it comes to Muslim women’s education, the existence of the minority character of AMU becomes of utmost importance; it’s a very crucial consideration for families sending their women to this institution. If the AMU ceases to be a minority institution, it will hamper the higher education of Muslim women in India to a significant extent.”
What is intriguing about the aforementioned quotation is its unproblematic insistence upon women’s unique “responsibility of bearing the cultural identity” of the group to which they belong. Why, one may ask, are women graced with the divine weight of identitarian integrity? What kind of “cultural identity” is it that requires women to act as its vessels? So much so that even their education is subordinate to the larger goal of preserving this culture. If any institution fails to guarantee this culture, then women’s education itself is tossed out.
The priority of culture over education derives from the hetero-patriarchal anxieties of minority communalists. One among the two law graduates believes that while queer sexuality might be legal, imposing it [read: not persecuting it] in Muslim institutions in the name of freedom of expression is a grave wrong.” While everyone can be a part of minority institutions, this “can’t be a green signal to deteriorate the culture of the institution or to impose your lifestyle or your concept of morality in the institution”—because, of course, not treating queer people like an existential threat to civilization would be too much to ask. This queer-phobic hostility is precisely what led to the tragic death of Ramchandra Siras, a poet and Professor of Marathi Literature at AMU, who faced institutional harassment due to his homosexuality.
A deep-rooted animosity to queerness is essential if one wants to preserve clearly demarcated notions of masculinity and femininity upon which one can map a patriarchal division of labor. In this division of labor, while women can very well access education and get jobs, they are, in some way or the other, distinctively tethered to the family. The traditionalist AMU law graduate, whose grandiloquent sermonizing we’ve been dissecting, regales us with tales of an Islamic conference where Muslim women were seen “making notes while holding children in their laps.” For him, this touching tableau is a vivid embodiment of the Islamic ideal that the “responsibility to get education” and “to raise a family” are “equally important” for women.
But one wonders—why is it always women who are tasked with performing this divine balancing act? Are they naturally wired to cradle a baby in one arm while wielding a pen in the other? Or is this just another polished repackaging of the belief that women’s aspirations must forever orbit around domesticity?
Enter Ali Shariati, the intellectual muse of our law graduate’s worldview. In Fatima is Fatima, Shariati paints a melodramatic portrait of modernity’s corrosive effects on gender relations. In his telling, economic independence grants women social and emotional autonomy, which loosens their instinctive bonds to family, husband, and children. No longer governed by sacrificial devotion, women begin to assess love, marriage, and motherhood through the cold calculus of profit and loss. In this dystopian world of emancipated women, love and loyalty become relics, while freedom and pleasure emerge as new gods. Motherhood, once a sacred duty, is outsourced to nannies or discarded altogether in favor of a self-actualized life.
For Shariati, modern women are not just agents of change but harbingers of cultural decay, where self-interest and autonomy destabilize the moral and spiritual coherence of society. But from a woman’s perspective, this so-called “cultural degeneration” might look suspiciously like a long-overdue disruption of asymmetrical emotional labor and sacrificial motherhood—a system where women are coerced into perpetual self-effacement. If Shariati’s nightmare is a world where women refuse to sacrifice themselves for the patriarchal family, perhaps it’s a dream worth realizing.
Interfaith Marriages Are Morally Legitimate
The hetero-patriarchal manias of our traditionalist interlocutor are also visible in his staunch opposition to inter-faith marriage. The “cultural identity” that he so fervently wants AMU to guard is to be maintained through a dynamic of coercive policing. Armed with his judicial prowess, our law graduate-turned-moral-philosopher solemnly declares: Islam imposes divine laws that govern sexual discipline. And this discipline is to be established through an ironclad ban on interfaith relationships.
To the naive souls who dare to call this a regressive restriction, our interlocutor offers a rebuttal so dazzlingly absurd that one is left breathless: “If you allow inter-faith marriage, what’s next? Incest?” Yes, you read that right. For him, opening the door to consensual relationships across faiths is a slippery slope that ends—logically, inevitably, apocalyptically—with siblings lining up at the altar. He must explain why he thinks incest – fraught with genetic risks, power imbalances, and emotional dependencies – is even remotely comparable to inter-faith relationships between consenting adults making informed choices.
The illogical leaps that our traditionalist interlocutor makes are inevitable given his attempt to confine men and women to different, segregated domains. No matter how much he supports giving education and jobs to women, this cannot hide his patriarchal attempt to permanently tie women to the realm of domesticity. This allows patriarchs to erect a sexual division of labor where women are forced to bear the double burden of unpaid domestic labor and (underpaid) wage labor.
Minority status cannot be a smokescreen for perpetuating inequality. If Indian Muslims are to truly advance educationally and socially, it is imperative that minority rights be decoupled from the patriarchal ideologies that seek to enshrine control over women and marginalized groups.
Yanis Iqbal is an undergraduate student of political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of the book Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia. He has published more than 350 articles in different magazines and websites on imperialism, social movements, political theory, education, and cultural criticism.
