Shah Bano case

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The case Shah Bano dates back to 1985. At that time the said Supreme Court of India ( Supreme Court ) of a divorced Muslim woman, Shah Bano, upkeep. Shah Bano was already 70 years old at the time of the divorce and had no source of income as there is no social security system in India.

After the divorce, Shah Bano sued her ex-husband, a lawyer, for maintenance payments as long as she was unable to take care of it herself and did not remarry. The lawsuit relied on the Criminal Procedure Code , the Indian penal code from 1973, in which such a procedure is laid down in Section 125. However, the defendant did not agree to this and was only willing to provide alimony for the period of Iddah (according to Islamic law, the period of around 4 months during which a woman is not allowed to remarry after the dissolution of her marriage, death or divorce of her husband ) to pay. The Madhya Pradesh High Court and later on the appeal also the Supreme Court decided in favor of the plaintiff. Both ruled that Muslim personal law could not apply in this case. The Supreme Court quoted Koran 2: 241 in the grounds of the judgment : “The released women are entitled to equipment (whereby) in a legal manner (to be dealt with). (This is considered) as an obligation for the godly. "

The judgment was criticized by Islamic legal scholars, the ʿUlamā ' , who also denied the Supreme Court the right to interpret the Koran. The legal scholars argued that Islamic marriage did not recognize any maintenance claims on the part of women. The Indian Congress Party government under Rajiv Gandhi , who feared losing the support of Muslim voters, gave in to this strict interpretation and overturned the court ruling in 1986 with the passage of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986 . This law severely restricted divorced Muslim women 's right to child support and reversed the previous decision of the Supreme Court.

Subsequent rulings by Indian courts, however, repeatedly awarded divorced Muslim women the right to maintenance by their husbands beyond the Iddah period, so that this question still does not seem to be conclusively settled.

The case is often viewed as a turning point in modern Indian politics as it helped strengthen the Hindutva movement. Many Hindus began to fear that loudly protesting minority groups might derive undue advantage. The abolition of Muslim special rights in the area of ​​family, marriage and inheritance law and the introduction of a uniform civil code , a civil law that applies equally to all Indians regardless of their religion , therefore became a central point of the Hindu nationalists .

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“But Islamic law has no maintenance obligation. Orthodox Indian Muslims (such as Darul Uloom's ) then declared that the judgment violated private Muslim law and founded the All India Muslim Law Board (AIMLB) in protest. The government gave in and passed a law that divorced Muslim women are not entitled to any maintenance. Since then, not a single Indian politician has dared to touch the power of the influential Muslim clergy. "

- Salman Rushdie

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Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b c Asghar Ali Engineer: Maintenance for Muslim women. In: The Hindu . August 7, 2000, archived from the original on November 26, 2016 ; accessed on September 2, 2015 .
  2. ↑ German translation after Rudi Paret : Sura: 2 - al-baqara verse: 241. In: Corpus Coranicum. 2nd edition, 1979, accessed September 13, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Salman Rushdie : Islam: Doubly Humiliated. In: The time . July 21, 2005, accessed September 13, 2019 .