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Since the Shahbano decision in the 1980's, the heated public debate on Muslim family law in India has framed Muslim women's right to equality in direct opposition to their right to religious liberty. This paper attempts to look at a different framework by examining the public debates over the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939 and the Pakistani Family Laws Ordinance, 1961. These legislations, which received almost unanimous support across the ideological spectrum, attempted to secure for Muslim women their rights as "Muslim women" by selectively codifying rules from various schools of Islamic law. Reformist clergy, women's groups and politicians reread Islamic history and borrowed from contemporary developments in the Middle East to challenge the rigid categories of Anglo-Mohammadan law and the hegemony of the colonial state.The paper examines the relationship of gender and the wider concerns of nationality and formation of community identity by following public debates through newspapers, party documents and assembly records to explain the building of consensus and the intellectual resources for the reforms. In the second part, the paper attempts to contrast the legislative and judicial attitudes towards the reforms by a close reading of judicial interpretations of the "new" laws. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]