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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.
I n 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 (fatwas) throughout India (Vishwa Lochan Madan v. Union of India 2005, Petition: 45-47).1 The suit alleged that dar ul qazas were unconstitutional on the grounds that their decisions were issued by religious authorities and were not overseen by the state's legal apparatus. According to the lawyer who filed the suit, Vishwa Lochan Madan, this meant that dar ul qazas constituted a "parallel judicial system" in competition with the secular state's legal institutions. His petition focused on Muslim marital disputes, arguing that they should be dealt with in state courts, not in Muslim legal forums.
In 2014, the Supreme Court decided that, as dar ul qazas' decisions were not legally recognized, they did not undermine state law. The Court clarified that fatwas that interfere with or contradict the individual rights granted by the Constitution and laws of India should be ignored. The court thereby recognized state courts as legally superior to religious institutions. Madan and the Supreme Court agreed that state courts and dar ul qazas constitute distinct legal spheres and that the distinction between these spheres maps onto secular and religious normative orders, respectively. Although Madan viewed this aspect of Indian legal pluralism as a threat to justice and the authority of...