Shameem, a Muslim farmer in northern India, is convinced there is a new conspiracy to humiliate his minority religion in the predominantly Hindu country. The swarthy man, his eyes blazing with anger, stands in a narrow alley separating mud-and-brick houses in Charthawal town and warns a dozen men around him of the coming danger.
"There is a plot to insult all Muslims and throw mud on our reputation," Shameem tells his friends in the sugarcane growing region of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
"The (Hindu nationalist) Bharatiya Janata Party, these women committees and media are making a big issue out of a small family matter to defame Islam," he said, as several others nodded.
Many Muslims in Charthawal are willing to believe him.
For weeks now, their dusty rural town has been caught in a national storm over the status of the country's Muslim women, among the least educated and empowered, and the power of Islamic clerics to dictate social norms.
The debate has been hijacked by political parties and now threatens to create new divisions between India's 130 million Muslims and Hindus, who make 80 percent of the officially secular nation's population of more than one billion.
Charthawal hit the headlines last month when a 28-year-old Muslim resident and mother of five small children, Imrana Bibi, was allegedly raped by her father-in-law
While the father-in-law was arrested after a complaint by Imrana, a Muslim village council decreed she had to live as her father-in-law's wife and treat her husband as her "son", outraging feminists and liberal Muslims.
South Asia's most influential Islamic theological school, Darul Uloom Deoband, also in Uttar Pradesh, decreed Imrana could not live with her husband as she was now prohibited to him according to the Holy Quran, sparking a furore that led to street protests.
Indian Muslims are governed by Islamic personal laws on issues such as marriages, divorce and property inheritance but come under secular law for criminal offences such as murder, rape and robbery.
Hindu hard-liners, including the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have long campaigned for common personal laws and charged that Muslims enjoyed special privileges under what they dub a pseudo-secular policy.
Imrana's case has given them a fresh opening.
"Muslims want personal laws for social matters. But when it comes to criminal law, they follow secular law rather than Islamic law where there are punishments like stoning to death," said Mukut Gupta, a Hindu shopkeeper in nearby Muzaffarnagar town. "This is wrong."
The BJP, floundering in opposition after its shock defeat in national polls last year, sees an opportunity in the controversy to revive its fortunes, analysts said.
"The trouble is that in Muslim personal law, there is total resistance to any change," BJP leader B.P. Singhal said on a television debate, adding that Hindu religious laws have been amended regularly over the past few decades to bring them more into sync with women's rights.
Reforming Muslim personal law is a sensitive issue in India.
In the 1980s, the case of an old Muslim woman, who took her rejected alimony plea to the Supreme Court, sparked a crisis over whether the court had jurisdiction over Islamic law.
The court's judgement upheld her right to alimony but this was later reversed by the then Congress government through a new law, seen as one of the contributing factors to the rise of the BJP on a Hindu nationalist platform.
Some Muslim clerics say there is no need to change personal laws as Islam provides self-respect to its women and back the decree against Imrana.
"According to Islam, after what happened between her and her father-in-law, a sacred relationship was violated," said Zulfiqur Ali, the most senior Muslim cleric in Muzaffarnagar.
"She cannot live with her husband anymore as the atmosphere in the family has become soiled."
Muslim women activists reject that contention and argue that Imrana should continue living with her husband as the couple's relationship remains intact.
Adil Salahi, the religion editor of Saudi Arabia's Arab News daily, agreed. He said the alleged rape did not imply a relationship between Bibi and her father-in-law to prohibit her from her husband.
"Therefore, there is no question about the validity of her marriage. The fatwa (religious order) is absurd," Salahi wrote in the Indian newspaper the Asian Age.
But the pressure is telling on Imrana.
"I will abide by the sharia," she said, referring to the Islamic law on social issues.
"But please leave me alone, please," the woman, covered from head to toe in a black gown and veil, pleaded with dozens of reporters who flocked her village.
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