No Longer One Law For All

by Melanie Phillips

Confusion abounds over the claim in the Sunday Times that Islamic law has been officially adopted in Britain with the government quietly giving powers under the Arbitration Acts to sharia courts to enforce their decisions. The story quoted Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, and who said he had taken advantage of a clause in the Arbitration Act 1996:

Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.

Siddiqi said: ‘We realised that under the Arbitration Act we can make rulings which can be enforced by county and high courts. The act allows disputes to be resolved using alternatives like tribunals. This method is called alternative dispute resolution, which for Muslims is what the sharia courts are.’

But there’s nothing new here at all. The rulings of the sharia courts, which have been in existence for years, have always been enforceable under the Arbitration Acts, as is all dispute resolution. They have not suddenly been given the force of law. In that respect, the story seems to be overheated and misleading.

This does not, however, dispel the serious concern about the spread of sharia law and the scope of these courts. Once again, misleading comparisons have been made with the Jewish religious courts in Britain, but the big difference is that these operate wholly within English law. Anything governed by statute law – personal status issues such as marriage or divorce, or inheritance – has to conform to English law. British Jews operate under the principle that ‘the law of the land is the law’. By contrast, the sharia courts are not only ruling on precisely such personal status issues but – even more alarmingly – are dealing with criminal matters such as domestic violence. True, the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal website says

MAT is unable to deal with criminal offences as we do not have jurisdiction to try such matters in the UK

and merely tries to bring about a reconciliation in such cases where the parties agree, with the final decision to prosecute remaining with the Crown Prosecution Service. However, given the inferior status of Muslim women under sharia, any sharia arbitration in respect of domestic violence can hardly be viewed with equanimity. Moreover, although the MAT website says that it

must operate within the legal framework of England and Wales

it seems that what it means by this is merely that this enables its rulings to be enforced rather than it recognises the primacy of English law over sharia – indeed, since Islam recognises no higher legal authority than sharia, such a recognition would seem to be deeply improbable.

The key point is that sharia law is not compatible with English law or the principles of equality and human rights that it embodies. The result – regardless of the fact that this is not, as the Sunday Times claimed, anything new – is that Britain is allowing the development of a de facto parallel legal system in Britain, thus destroying our society's cardinal principle of of one law for all. In his book Faith Power and Territory: A Handbook of British Islam Patrick Sookhdeo writes:

The Sharia Council of the Darul Uloom London even appears to assume the possibility of child marriages, as there are instructions on its website for how to deal with the divorce of a girl who has not yet reached puberty.

Elsewhere in his book Sookhdeo writes:

The move to implement sharia in the UK, both within the Muslim community and within the British legal system, must be seen as part of Islam’s inherent compulsion to dominate every society within which it finds itself. Part of the Islamic legal tradition is that it treats individuals not as persons in their own rights but only as members of a religious community. The community has inherent rights but far less so the individual. While some expressions of this drive might seem harmless, and may be justified in providing for Muslims who wish to live voluntarily by sharia, there are real dangers in the use of strong communal pressure on individual Muslims to accept sharia litigation (not least for Muslim women who are disadvantaged under sharia). Integrating sharia precepts into British law would gradually impose elements of Islamic religious law on non-Muslims in the UK. Both trends contradict the human rights and freedoms of individuals which are enshrined in modern western states. British law is based on territorial jurisdiction – all citizens within the state territory have equal rights before the law. Muslims pushing for sharia integration into British law are actually asking for a new system that treats citizens in different ways according to their religious community.

Indeed, if this continues Britain will break up as a unitary state governed by one law for all. Sharia law should be stopped, not condoned or encouraged. No other minority in Britain either wants or is permitted to live under an alternative legal system. This is the way a society fractures -- and then goes under.