Empowerment of the Muslim Woman in India: Issues and Strategies

The aim of the paper is to explore the level of empowerment of Muslim women in India through the analysis of their socioeconomic status and to find out the issues behind this. With 14.2% of the total population, Muslims are India's second-largest community and the largest minority community. There are 83.97 million Muslim women in this country, which is greater than the total population of many Muslim nations in the world. A lion’s share of this population lives in rural areas and is economically, educationally, culturally, and politically backward. Still now around 50% of the total Muslim women are illiterate and a very few of them are employed. They are the least politically involved. They have very little liberty to go out of the family alone or make decisions regarding family matters or even for themselves and have to abide by strictly the rules of the male members of society. Lack of education, ignorance, poverty, orthodox nature, social barriers, etc. is the main issues behind these. In order to uplift their present status, different positive actions should be taken by the governments, the NGOs, the Muslim elites, and the Muslim women activists.