Sharia Courts and Muslim Personal Law in India: Intersecting Legal Regimes

In July 2005, a Delhi lawyer filed suit with the Supreme Court of India seeking to ban “sharia courts” (dar ul qazas) and Islamic legal opinions, arguing that they constitute a “parallel judicial system” that undermines the state's legal institutions. The Supreme Court decided in 2014 that dar ul qazas are not parallel but appropriate alternative forums. In this article, I analyze several divorce cases in Delhi and Patna dar ul qazas to show that, rather than being alternative or parallel, dar ul qazas intersect with state courts. Attending to this intersection, I argue, has implications for how we understand legal pluralism, secularism, and the relation between them. Specifically, I argue that because of how cases travel between dar ul qazas and state courts, dar ul qazas help to consolidate the oppositions between religious and secular law, kin relations, and rights upon which secularism relies.