Back in 2006, a study revealed that 85 unofficial Shariah courts were already operating out of mosques all over the United Kingdom. The largest of them, the Islamic Shariah Council in Leyton, set up in 1982, has handled 7,000 divorce cases. Mufti Barkatullah, one of its founders explains:
"People who live in the United Kingdom undertake and abide by the law of the land, but they regard those laws as administrative laws, not a divine law. The matters of marriage and divorce don't fall into the state domain. It is a religious matter."
The first Mohammedan Arbitration Tribunal, the first official Shariah law court in the UK was set up in December 2007 by scholars and lawyers at Hijaz College Islamic University in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The Mohammedan Arbitration Tribunal has binding legal status because it operates in tandem with the British legal system and decisions challenged by the losing party will be upheld by a county court bailiff or high court sheriff.
The advances made by Islamic law into Britain hit the headlines when in February 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr
Rowan Williams... sometimes known as the Archdruid of Canterbury, an indifferent theologian and a poor communicator, so obtuse as to occasionally be mistaken for brilliant but chock full of bland New Agey Feel-Goodisms ...
, said in a public lecture, at the Royal Courts of Justice: "my aim is only... to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state, with a few thoughts about what might be entailed in crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom."
These comments caused a firestorm and more than 250 articles appeared in the world press within a month. The polarized debate that followed triggered the idea for this book which explores the conflict between Western secularism and the demands of Islam as well as the issues of equality before the law and parallel jurisdictions in a multicultural society. "Shari'a in the West" is a collection of essays by leading scholars representing different political viewpoints and faith traditions.
In their introduction, the editors, Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney, admit that the question whether Shariah should be recognized and incorporated into the legal systems of the liberal democracies of the West is an imposing one: "The issue has become a proverbial 'hot potato' in the corridors of power, as well as the more commonplace cafes, cyberspace chat rooms, bars, and living rooms of society. Hardly a week goes by in the West without a controversy erupting over some aspects of Mohammedan ritual, symbolism, belief, or practice."
On the one hand, critics fear that secularism, liberalism and individualism in Western democracies are under threat because the Shariah involves all the aspects of our life from the intimately personal, spiritual and familial, through to the management of interpersonal relations at a communal level. Shariah is also feared in the West where it conjures images of harsh physical punishments. On the other hand members of non-Christian faiths invoke the principles of Western liberalism supposed to grant the right to practice freely different religions.
Wael Hallaq (quoted by Rex Ahdar and Nicholas Aroney) makes an interesting point when he says that the Western colonization of the Islamic world during the 19th and early 20th century's led to the creation of 'sovereign' nation-states and the enactment of positive legal codes embodying secular legal values. This resulted in the severing of the institutional and social roots of the old Shariah based rule of law which in time resulted in a fundamentalist resurgence with an emphasis on the reinstitution of Islamic law.