The Forgotten Daughters of Faith: Disability, Religion, and the Invisible Citizenship of Muslim Women Under South Asian Legal Regimes

Introduction: An Overlooked Human Rights Crisis

Despite formal guarantees of equality and non-discrimination in secular constitutions of South Asian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, disabled Muslim women occupy a “blind spot” where legal recognition exists but not in practice. Across South Asia, Muslim women with psychosocial or physical disabilities face systemic exclusion not only in legal but also in social spheres. Although secular constitutions formally guarantee equality and religious personal laws promise protection, they experience invisible citizenship. Also, this marginalization reflects a significant gap between formal legal guarantees and lived realities of disabled Muslim women. However, this article will explore how indirect discrimination embedded in religious interpretation, administrative silence and social stigma fabricates, what can be termed as an “Invisible citizenship” for disabled Muslim women. Moreover, this research will investigate how there are gaps between law and practice rooted in the intersection of gender, religion and ability, although there is existing human rights norms and disability legislation in South Asian countries.

Constructing Invisible Citizenship: The Intersection of Gender, Religion, and Disability

Actually, disabled Muslim women remain virtually absent from both disability-rights discourse and feminist legal theory. Also, while scholars from all over the world have treated “Muslim women” only as a homogenous group in their research but overlook how psychosocial and physical disabilities alter women’s access to consent and citizenship within personal law frameworks. Moreover, in many Muslim countries discriminative practices against women appear to have been adopted. In South Asian countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the status of Muslim women varies significantly due to differing legal frameworks and interpretations of Islam, but they may not perfectly align with how Muslim women with psychosocial and physical disabilities navigate their trauma and interact with the transformative constitutionalism to promote substantive equity and inclusion. Also, research has observed that South Asian women with disabilities are frequently as weak and helpless^[1].

Although, disabled Muslim women possess the status of formal citizenship and constitutional rights, yet they often can’t properly exercise those rights in a meaningful way. Actually, they become legally visible on paper, but socially they remain invisible in practice. Therefore, there is an urgency for interdisciplinary research that examines how do religious personal law regimes, united with bureaucratic and social norms construct invisible citizenship for disabled Muslim women – and also undermine legal capacity and contradict International human rights obligations including:

1. UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) &

2. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Between Rights and Reality: Mapping the Legal Framework

The legal protection of disabled Muslim women in South Asia is shaped under the intersection of constitutional guarantees, religious personal laws and international human rights obligations. Although South Asian countries including Bangladesh, India and Pakistan each recognize equality before the law and ensure the prohibition of discrimination through their constitutions, but significant loopholes still remain between their formal legal protections and their practical implementations which often leaves Muslim women with psychosocial and physical disabilities inadequately protected. Muslim women with disabilities continuously face a myriad of challenges due to some interconnected factors including ethnicity, religion, gender and family status.

At the constitutional level, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan guarantee certain rights including equality before the law, prohibition of discrimination and recognize the fundamental rights of all citizens. Also, these constitutional commitments are reinforced by each of these countries’ national disability legislation including Bangladesh’s Rights and Protection of Persons with Disabilities Act 2013, India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 and Pakistan’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2020. Collectively, these legal instruments aim to promote equal protection and participation for people with disabilities. At the international level, international human rights law further strengthens these obligations as all the three countries are parties to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against women (CEDAW), and also these countries are required to maintain the harmony of their domestic legal frameworks with these international standards. Actually, the detachment between the constitutional promises and practical experiences demonstrates that alone legal recognition is not sufficient. To achieve actual equality requires a disability-inclusive interpretation of religious personal laws, well-connected alignment between domestic legal procedures and international human rights standards and also stronger implementation of constitutional and statutory protections.

From Legal Subjects to Equal Citizens

Actually, the transformation of invisible citizenship into meaningful citizenship regarding disabled Muslim women requires reforms that extend beyond legislation. Governments in South Asian Countries must ensure accessible legal and administrative institutions and also policy makers should incorporate mainstream disability within family law reform. Although international human rights law provides an important foundation for reform in this regard, legal change must also be inflicted in religious traditions. Contemporary Islamic feminist hermeneutics demonstrates that Islamic principles of justice, dignity and equality can meaningfully support disability-inclusive interpretations of personal law and also such approaches challenge patriarchal reading of Islamic law by recovering justice-oriented and inclusive interpretations that affirm the moral and legal agency of women with disabilities^[2].

Conclusion

The forgotten daughters of faith represent one of the most neglected and least explored intersections within contemporary human rights law. Their lived experiences demonstrate that alone formal legal recognition is not sufficient and cannot ensure their equality where there are remaining structural exclusion because of disability. In addition, inadequate address of disability related concerns in the administrative practice and judicial interpretations make it worse for women with disabilities. Therefore, meaningful reforms definitely require harmonizing disability legislation, constitutional guarantees, religious personal laws and persisting international human rights standards so that Muslim women with psychosocial and physical disabilities do not expose to multiple forms of discrimination that remain least recognized within both feminist legal scholarship and disability-rights discourse. By the integration of disability justice in Islamic Jurisprudence and international human rights law, South Asian legal system can genuinely ensure inclusive citizenship for disable Muslim women. Only by doing this they can fulfil the promise of equality, justice and inclusive citizenship for all people along with the Muslim Women with disabilities.

Reference(S):

International Instruments

•  Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Dec. 13, 2006, 2515 U.N.T.S. 3 (entered into force May 3, 2008).

• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Dec. 18, 1979, 1249 U.N.T.S. 13 (entered into force Sept. 3, 1981).

Legislation

• CONST.

• INDIA CONST.

• CONST.

• The Rights and Protection of Persons with Disabilities Act, No. 39 of 2013, (Bangl.).

• The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, No. 49 of 2016, India Code (2016).

Thesis

• Zahra Khan, An Exploration of the Impact of Disability on the Lives of South Asian Muslim Women in Winnipeg (2016) (M.A. thesis, University of Manitoba), https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/5c52453b-97d7-4cb2-8e01-086dbf88eac6/content.

• Izaida Ibrahim & Muhammad Fahmi Ismail, Muslims with Disabilities: Psychosocial Reforms from an Islamic Perspective, 22 J. Disability & Religion 1 (2018), doi.org.

^[1] Zahra Khan, An Exploration of the Impact of Disability on the Lives of South Asian Muslim Women in Winnipeg 36 (2016) (M.A. thesis, University of Manitoba), umanitoba.ca.

^[2] Irma Riyani, Muslim Feminist Hermeneutical Method to the Qur’an (Analytical Study to the Method of Amina Wadud), 21 Ulumuna 298, 298 (2017), https://doi.org/10.20414/ujis.v21i2.320.