Muhammadi Begum

1.

In 1898, a young woman of twenty, newly married and living in Lahore, wrote a letter to her older sister: ‘I have decided to start a journal for women. Would you be willing to help me with the task, and write some essays for me?’. Her sister replied: 

Your brother-in-law gets angry when he sees me writing. I am powerless. If it is ever possible, I will send you an article and sign it ‘a well-wishing sister’. I am afraid that with the noise the children make around me, and my many household chores, I will find it hard to divert my attention to writing an article. 

The younger sister was Muhammadi Begum. She would go on to establish Tahzeeb e Niswan, a pioneering weekly magazine for women. The purpose of the new magazine was not just to promote female writers but also to fight for women’s rights. The hesitant response of the elder sister, Ahmadi Begum, couched in stilted prose, illustrated the problem that has to be addressed. Women were conditioned to only serve the needs of the family: first in their father’s home, and then in the marital abode. Both sisters helped at a very early age to bring up their brothers when their mother died, until a stepmother took her place. 

Muhammadi Begum married Sayyid Mumtaz Ali (1860-1935), a Deobandi scholar who acquired the title Shams al-Ulama (Sun of Religious Scholars). A widower twice her age, he expected much more from his wife then to be the mother of his three children from a former marriage. For Mumtaz Ali was a women’s right advocate and wrote vigorously about the social situation of Muslim women and the problems of gender inequality in nineteenth century India. In his ground-breaking 1898 book, Haqooq-i-Niswan (Rights of Women), Mumtaz Ali rejected the conventional arguments advanced by Muslim scholars for female subjugation. There is no notion of inherent male superiority over women in Islam, he wrote. Neither do men have greater physical or intellectual strength. There is no rational basis for requiring two female witnesses against one man in a court of law. Or for a daughter to have only half the share of the son in inheritance. In the late nineteenth century, these were revolutionary ideas – a declaration of war against the orthodoxy. It is said that when Mumtaz Ali read the first draft of the book to Sir Seyyed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), the modernist reformer and founder of the Aligarh Muslim University, Sir Seyyed was so enraged that he tore up the manuscript. In the young Muhammadi Begum, Mumtaz Ali saw a similar spirit. He married her because she was highly literate and had the potential to be a journalist. He wanted his young wife to be the sole editor of his dream project – a magazine for women largely by women.

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