Comment on the Comments
Comment on the Comments

Comment on the Comments

William Oddie FAITH MAGAZINE May-June 2014

Sharia Law: A Catholic Critique

What does it mean to say that this is a Christian country? Historically and culturally, it is undeniable that that is what we are: but what, for such a culture, are the implications of the “multiculturalism” that was at one time more intellectually respectable than it is today, but which is nevertheless, for good or ill, now irreversibly established in England?

Specifically, how concerned should Christians be at recent attempts to give Sharia law a quasi-official status alongside the law of the land that governs the rest of us? In March, the Law Society quietly issued “guidance” which would make it possible for Muslims to commission English solicitors to draw up “Sharia compliant” wills.

The Christian peer Baroness Cox – who in 2011 attempted in the House of Lords to enact legislation called the Arbitration and Mediation Services Equality Bill, to protect women living here from the effects of Sharia as it is already allowed to be practised in this country – reacted to this démarche with some alarm. “This violates everything that we stand for,” she protested.

“It would make the suffragettes turn in their graves. Everyone has freedom to make their own will and everyone has freedom to let those wills reflect their religious beliefs. But to have an organisation such as the Law Society seeming to promote or encourage a policy which is inherently gender discriminatory in a way which will have very serious implications for women and possibly for children is a matter of deep concern.”

The whole point, of course, is that our entire democracy is built on the fundamental principle that there is one law for everyone, high or low, believer or unbeliever, and that the law protects our liberties as well as constraining and channelling them. There is no habeas corpus in Sharia law; there is no right in English law, furthermore, for a man to put away his wife by simply repeating “I divorce you” three times.

The question is this: should other Christians – should Catholics – share this concern? The text of the Law Society’s “guidance” certainly appears to bear out Baroness Cox’s reaction. The document sets out crucial differences between Sharia inheritance laws and Western traditions. It explains how, in Islamic custom, inheritances are divided among a set list of heirs determined by ties of kinship rather than named individuals. It acknowledges the possibility of people having multiple marriages.

“The male heirs in most cases receive double the amount inherited by a female heir of the same class,” the guidance says. “Non-Muslims may not inherit at all, and only Muslim marriages are recognised. Similarly, a divorced spouse is no longer a Sharia heir, as the entitlement depends on a valid Muslim marriage existing at the date of death. This means you should amend or delete some standard will clauses.”

It advises lawyers to draft special exclusions from the Wills Act 1837, which allows gifts to pass to the children of an heir who has died, because this is not recognised in Islamic law.

The Law society, in other words, has given “guidance” to its members as to how to draft wills in a way which circumvents English legal principles as they have always been accepted: and it envisages that this might even mean taking on the English law in court to see if their wily little legal tricks have been successful: a perfect example of an attempt to make the letter of the law prevail over its spirit: Christians will remember that, according to St Paul (2 Corinthians 3:6), “the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”.

This is not, of course, the first time the notion of integrating Sharia law into our legal system has been suggested; readers will recall that no less a person than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said that it was “unavoidable”. This is how the BBC reported it (7 Feb 2008):

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He says Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”.

In an exclusive interview with BBC correspondent Christopher Landau, ahead of a lecture to lawyers in London on Monday, Dr Williams argues this relies on Sharia law being better understood. At the moment, he says “sensational reporting of opinion polls” clouds the issue. “An approach to law which simply said – there’s one law for everybody – I think that’s a bit of a danger.”

He stresses that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well”.

But Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that’s a bit of a danger. There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.

Well, Dr Williams may think we can simply adopt “some aspects” of Sharia law; but for Muslims, Sharia law is indivisible. Their law permits them, as a temporary expedient, not to impose it in full in countries where they are in a minority: but in areas within that country which they consider to be Muslim territory and therefore part of the Umma, like large parts of Bradford, say, or certain parts of London, more of Sharia law will be imposed (unknown to the rest of us) than in others.

Dr Williams says that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states” and gives as one example of that: “the attitudes to women”. Well, maybe nobody should want to see that in this country: but the Law Society is now openly and blatantly proposing to make precisely these attitudes to women a part of our legal system: so the body officially representing all solicitors actually does want to see it.

Is this something we should as a society be prepared to tolerate? This is how Baroness Cox explained the intentions underlying her Arbitration and Mediation Services Equality Bill:

We live in a country where we have a fundamental commitment to equality under the law and to freedom, and that’s a very precious commitment to our liberal democracy and our traditions, but there’s been growing up in our midst an alternative system, which affects many citizens, especially women. It’s a kind of quasi-legal system that goes under the name of Sharia law and obviously it’s associated with the Muslim community. It discriminates systematically against women, particularly in matters of family law and testimony evidence before the law and domestic violence. I just don’t feel you can have a quasi-legal system operating alongside our own historic and traditional legal system, particularly one which discriminates against women and is causing many women real suffering.

She failed, of course, to get her law on the statute book; and many will think that that was regrettable. But Parliament now has surely to act to contain the threat to English law which this latest encroachment of Sharia law will represent – if the Law Society has its way. As The Sunday Telegraph said at the time of the Law Society’s initiative: “Britain’s legal system has its roots in Judaeo-Christian morality. It is, or should be, a single system of law that applies to everyone. That is the most fundamental principle of British justice. Our society welcomes diversity, but this should not mean adopting legal practices that are hostile to our values.”

The extent to which a parallel system already operates, however, is not generally understood. According to a study by the think-tank Civitas, many more Sharia courts are operating in Britain than is generally assumed. The tribunals operate mainly from mosques, and they settle financial and family disputes according to religious principles. They lay down judgments which can be given full legal status if approved in national law courts.

However, they operate behind closed doors and their decisions, according to Civitas, are likely to be unfair to women and backed by intimidation. Commentators on the influence of Sharia law often recognise only the five courts in London, Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham and Nuneaton that are run by the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, and whose rulings are enforced through the state courts under the 1996 Arbitration Act.

But the Civitas study, by the academic Islamic specialist Denis MacEoin, estimates that there are in fact at least 85 working tribunals and he says that the principles on which most Sharia courts work are indicated by the fatwas – religious decrees – set out on websites run by British mosques.

“Among the rulings,” says the report, “we find some that advise illegal actions and others that transgress human rights standards as applied by British courts.” Examples set out in the study include a ruling that no Muslim woman may marry a non-Muslim man unless he converts to Islam and that any children of a woman who does should be taken from her until she marries a Muslim.

Further rulings, according to the report, approve polygamous marriage and enforce a woman’s duty to have sex with her husband on his demand.

The report went on: “The fact that so many Sharia rulings in Britain relate to cases concerning divorce and custody of children is of particular concern, as women are not equal in Sharia law, and Sharia contains no specific commitment to the best interests of the child that is fundamental to family law in the UK. Under Sharia, a male child belongs to the father after the age of seven, regardless of circumstances.”

The whole point, of course, is that our entire democracy is built on the fundamental principle that there is one law for everyone, high or low, believer or unbeliever, and that the law protects our liberties as well as constraining and channelling them. There is no habeas corpus in Sharia law; there is no right in English law, furthermore, for a man to put away his wife by simply repeating “I divorce you” three times.

Dr Williams’s pronouncements on Sharia law were, said the Sunday Times commentator Minette Marrin at the time, “a truly astonishing revelation of his unfitness for his office”. Well, she may think that; as a Catholic commentator, I couldn’t possibly comment.

For the Master of Magdalene, which Dr Williams is today, to come out with such speculative reflections would certainly have been much less controversial. But now, of course, there would be no interview on The World at One. Nobody would notice. It is surely good, for him as well as for the Church of England, that Dr Williams is now comfortably settled in Cambridge. I wonder if he is causing as much local bemusement there as I remember him doing in Oxford in the 1980s.  

Faith Magazine