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News > India

India’s Top Court To View Appeal Allowing Women Into Mosques

  • India's top court to consider petition urging mosques to allow women inside the Muslim places of worship.

    India's top court to consider petition urging mosques to allow women inside the Muslim places of worship. | Photo: Reuters

Published 16 April 2019
Opinion

India’s Supreme Court will consider a petition ​​​​​​from a Muslim couple urging women access to enter mosques.

India’s Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to consider a petition from a Muslim couple to allow women into mosques, seeking to overturn a centuries-old practice that largely bars women from the places of worship.

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Women are not allowed inside most mosques in India although a few have separate entrances for women to go into segregated areas.

The petitioners, Yasmeen Peerzade and her husband Zuber Peerzade, said that women were allowed to enter mosques during the time of the Prophet Mohammad.

“Like men, women also have the constitutional rights to offer worship according to their belief,” they said in their written statement.

“There should not be any gender discrimination and allow Muslim women to pray in all mosques,” say the couple.

The court last year lifted a ban on the entry of women of menstrual age at a Hindu temple in southern India saying it was a violation of their right to worship.

The Muslim couple referred to the temple ruling, which angered conservative Hindus when it was passed, as a precedent to support their call for women to be allowed to pray in mosques.

The petition comes at a sensitive time for relations been minority Muslims and the majority Hindu community in India.

Some members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist ruling party have been accused of stirring communal animosity as the party seeks a second term in a staggered general election now underway.

Supreme Court Judge Sharad Arvind Bobde said the court will examine the couple’s request at length.

In 2017, the court ruled a law unconstitutional which previously allowed Muslim men to divorce their wives simply by uttering three time the word 'talaq', which means divorce.

This year, the government issued an executive order making instant divorce an offense punishable with up to three years in jail.

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