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July 11 - July 11, 2020
wakfs.
mahr.”
Purdahnashins don’t speak with men,”
Hanafi Muslims.”
“‘Nashin’ means ‘sitting’ or ‘dwelling.’ Therefore, ‘purdahnashins’ means ‘those who stay behind the veil.’”
“So you are Perveen.” Gwendolyn Hobson-Jones pronounced it slowly, as if it were the name of an exotic place. “In your language, what does that name mean?” “It means star in three languages: Persian, Arabic, and Urdu. My grandfather chose my name.”
“What is a Parsi?” asked Amina in slow, studied English. “A Zoroastrian born in India.” Seeing Amina’s small brows drawn together in a questioning way, Perveen elaborated. “We worship God, but we call him Ahura Mazda rather than Allah. My people came on boats from Persia a very long time ago. Other Persian Zoroastrians have come in the last hundred years. They call themselves Iranis, because that is the country’s name in Persian. ”
“Razia-begum, it seems that you are chained to some people and a large old house that you cannot fully enjoy.” Razia looked warily at Perveen. “Is that not the meaning of family?”
The boundaries communities drew around themselves seemed to narrow their lives—whether it was women and men, Hindus and Muslims, or Parsis and everyone else.
vakil, a lawyer with traditional Indian law training rather than a modern law school degree.
“Binamazi—the Zoroastrian tradition of seclusion for women during menses—likely originated during the Yazdani era, twelve hundred years ago.
“Muslim law is all about mathematical fractions—Alice
Perveen Mistry was inspired by India’s earliest women lawyers: Cornelia Sorabji of Poona, the first woman to read law at Oxford and the first woman to sit the British law exam in 1892, and Mithan Tata Lam of Bombay, who also read law at Oxford and was the first woman admitted to the Bombay Bar in 1923.
Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, a biography by her nephew, Richard Sorabji.
