Farzana Sheikh Aslam, 37, teaches in a school in Mumbra and is bringing up her two children as a single parent. Twelve years ago, her husband left her to marry another woman. For someone who says she once wore a burqa and whose hands trembled when faced with the prospect of talking to a stranger, her renting a two-room-and-kitchen home has been a phenomenal journey.

“Most traditional Muslim men use the law of talaaq as it exists as a threat to women. They tell us that according to the Hadees (the Prophet’s traditions and sayings) whenever a divorce happens, arsh and farsh (the sky and earth) shake. So many divorces are taking place. I don’t see any movement,” says Farzana who works for an NGO Khoj which is working on school education in the otherwise ignored corners of Mumbai like Mumbra.

Women like Farzana was what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was rooting for when last fortnight, speaking to a gathering of Muslim clerics from across the country, he strongly condemned the linking of Islam with terror but delivered an unequivocal message: the community had to reform its treatment of women. He had enough reason to.

A 2004 survey by political scientists Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon found that key social indicators for Muslim women were more worrying than for other social groups. In the survey done across 12 states, it was found that in rural north India, only 15% of Muslim women were literate (as against the 2001 national 39.3% figure for women), and as one went up the education ladder, the drop-out rate was alarming. Only 3.56 per cent of Muslim women could be classified as having received higher education, which is less than the figure for Scheduled Castes. Even in employment, the gap is glaring: just 11.4% of Muslim women are in the workforce, lower than the dismal 16% for Hindu women.

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