Listen to this article:

Kerala is once again arguing about who controls Muslim women’s place in public life, and once again the argument has found a convenient external villain: the Gulf. The sequence matters, because it has been getting twisted in the narratives.

It started with Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who posted that the Muslim community needed “introspection and internal discussion” on what he called the “import of conservative and even reactionary attitudes and customs from abroad.” He was leaning on a World Bank working paper that claims migrants returning from Saudi Arabia carry home more conservative attitudes toward gender-based violence than those who never migrated.

When it was pointed out to him that the paper was four years old and that its headline claims sat awkwardly against its own raw survey numbers, Tharoor allowed that this was “a welcome corrective.” The correction did little to slow a common trend online – Gulf returnees, particularly those who had worked in Saudi Arabia, being blamed for importing patriarchy into Kerala.

It was only after this, and after Muslim women turned out visibly in Nabi Day (Milad-un-Nabi) rallies and functions across Kerala that Kanthapuram A.P. Aboobacker Musliyar’s faction of Samastha Kerala Jam’eyyat ul-Ulama issued its circular, instructing that women should not share stages with men or appear in mixed public programmes. Kanthapuram went further at a conference in Kochi, arguing that Islam prescribes purdah because women on public platforms could cause “great destruction,” and that the Quran requires women to stay within their homes.

Confronted by women political leaders, he held his ground, justifying the position as a century of settled religious teaching that had preserved women’s “honour and dignity.”

That order of events cuts against the Gulf-import narrative rather than supporting it. Kanthapuram was not reacting to a newly arrived Saudi custom. He was reacting to the visible, growing presence of Muslim women in Kerala’s own religious public life. The World Bank paper and the Nabi Day circular are, in truth, two unrelated stories that got fused together in the space of a single social media thread.

Was the conservatism imported?

Kanthapuram’s circular has nothing to do with a community absorbing new habits off a returning flight from Riyadh. It actually came from the leadership of an organisation with roots in Kerala’s own religious history, dating to the reformist ferment of the 1920s and the eventual formation of Samastha at Calicut in 1926. The 1989 split that produced today’s E.K. and A.P. factions was a dispute over political alignment and institutional control, not theology – and on the specific question........

© The Wire