Dawood Sharifa Khanum

D Sharifa Khanum Women's Rights Activist India   Sharifa Khanum has belonged to the women’s movement in India for nearly two decades and heads STEPS Women’s Development Organisation which she founded in 1987.  STEPS provides temporary shelter for battered women, combats violence against women by working with both the local community and the police and addresses women’s livelihood issues. Prompted by extremist violence against Muslims in India during the 1990s and discrimination against women in their homes and communities, she began organising women in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.  In 2004, her efforts led to the creation of the Tamil Nadu Muslim Women’s Jamaat Committee, the first network of Muslim women in the state.  This network functions as a community tribunal for hearing Muslim women’s problems in areas like personal law, livelihood issues and young girl’s education.  Since setting up, the women’s jamaat has announced plans to build a women only mosque.  Sharifa is spearheading the campaign to create a mosque for women in Pudukkottai District (which is about 400kms from Chennai), complete with a woman priest. She's got 3,000 women behind her--and a lot of Muslim religious patriarchs against her.  The idea of a women's mosque was born out of mounting frustrations with the rulings of the jamaat that consists of male elders who decide on family issues such as marriage, dowry, divorce, domestic violence, custody, and child abuse.  Women seeking assistance from the police on such matters would be often referred to the jamaat. However, the jamaat would only convene in the mosque--a place where women would not be permitted to enter. In India, Muslim women mostly pray in adjoining buildings.  Hence women would not be able to give their side of the story or hear judgments in cases that involved them. A nearby village has donated the land for the mosque and its first bricks have been laid – however Sharifa still needs another 3.5 million rupees to complete the mosque. The local men have put pressure on Sharifa to call the building a community centre instead of the mosque as they associate power with mosques and do not want women to be empowered.  However, she has not succumbed to the threats against her and continues to try and raise funds for the mosque. Sharifa has also bypassed local Shariah boards and the Ulemas and has had portions of the Quran that deal with women’s rights translated from Arabic to Tamil and distributed the material to women in several Tamil Nadu villages.