NEW DELHI, 18 August 2005 — India’s law minister said yesterday it was up to the country’s 130 million Muslims to decide whether they want to follow edicts or “fatwas” issued by Islamic family courts.
The comments by Law Minister H.R. Bharadwaj came after a lawyer, Vishwa Lochan Madan, filed a petition demanding that the Supreme Court order the dissolution of all Islamic courts and ban new ones.
While there are tribal courts in other parts of India, it was not clear if they were covered by the suit.
Madan, a Supreme Court lawyer, is seeking a declaration that religious decrees or “fatwas” issued by the courts on personal matters have no legal sanction.
He said Islamic courts pose a challenge to India’s judicial system set up under the secular constitution.
But the Press Trust of India quoted Bharadwaj as saying, “If anything wrong was being done under (Muslim) law, the community should address it. They should decide whether they would be governed by fatwas or not.”
The Supreme Court has asked all India’s states and three Muslim bodies for their views on Madan’s petition. The constitution of the majority Hindu nation of over one billion people treats all religions as equal but allows followers to practice separate laws on marriage, divorce and property.
The new controversy was stirred by an edict issued by Muslim clerics and upheld by the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board, that a 28-year-old woman allegedly raped by her father-in-law should marry him and divorce her husband.
The case which came to light in June sparked a storm, with angry rights groups and Muslim women slamming the fatwa although the victim said she was resigned to her fate.
The main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and other critics have attacked the parallel Muslim judicial system as being sometimes more strict than in some Islamic nations. They want a uniform civil code.
But Zafar-ul-Islam Khan, editor of Muslim Internet news magazine Milligazette.com, said such Islamic family courts “are in place to see that such problems don’t go to the court which are overburdened.
“These courts only have moral power. If two parties don’t accept its verdict, they can go to the police or the courts,” he said.
