Anglican Mainstream

Islamic courts meet every week in the UK to rule on divorces and financial disputes. Clare Dwyer Hogg and Jonathan Wynne-Jones report in the Sunday Telegraph on demands by senior Muslims that sharia be given legal authority

“Penal law is the duty of the Muslim state – it is not in the hands of any public institution like us to handle it. Only a Muslim government that believes in Islam is going to implement it. So there is no question of asking for penal law to be introduced here in the UK – that is out of the question.”

Despite this, Dr Hasan is open in supporting the severe punishments meted out in countries where sharia law governs the country. “Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society. This is why in Saudi Arabia, for example, where these measures are implemented, the crime rate is very, very, low,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Many are uncomfortable with the idea of linking sharia to civil law in Britain. In The Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, wrote: “Attempts have been made to impose an “Islamic” character on certain areas?… There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered?”

There are also issues around the Islamic approach to equality and human rights that make integration with British law problematic and contentious.

Sharia judges in this country deal mainly with divorce – khula. In Islamic law, a husband can divorce his wife in the presence of two witnesses without having to go through an official system.

He can even merely utter the word “talaq” – meaning “to release” – to gain a divorce, whether or not the wife accepts it. She has no such right and must go through the processes of sharia, entreating judges to grant her divorce.

“The introduction of sharia law in Britain raises complex questions, as some of its basic tenets are incompatible with the fundamental principles of our liberal democracy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” says Baroness Cox, a leading human rights campaigner. “There is no equality before the law between men and women and between Muslims and non-Muslims; and there is no freedom to choose and change religion.”

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