INSIDE BRITAIN’S SHARI A COURTS
Sharia courts, some enlightened, others brutally misogynist — condoning forced marriages and polygamy — are on the rise. But how can we reconcile this ancient form of justice with modern British values, asks DAVID JONES, who spent a day . . .
WHAT strikes you first is the squalid nature of the women’s stories. Their husbands have beaten and abused them, they claim; lied and cheated, cavorted with prostitutes, become addicted to drugs. One weeping wife even accuses her spouse of molesting her infant child.
Wearing colourful headscarves and robes, and often clutching handbags stuffed with banknotes to pay the £300 fee for their cases to be decided, this procession of downtrodden women have come before a panel of three judges to plead for their miserable marriages to be dissolved.
Four of the eight petitioners were born overseas — in Ghana, Ethiopia and Pakistan — and two speak such poor English that they find it easier to describe their marital woes in Urdu on this rainy Sunday afternoon in the heart of Birmingham.
We are not in a divorce court. At least, not one with any standing in the civil law of England and Wales.
Convened in a windowless chamber in the city’s huge Central Mosque, decorated with pictures of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and a rather magnificent Moroccan tea urn, this is one of Britain’s secretive sharia law courts. After much negotiation, I have been granted a rare glimpse into its arcane, controversial workings.
Such is the protective veil surrounding these religious tribunals (or councils, as Islamic jurists prefer to call them) that, as a recent Home Office review conceded, not even the Government knows how many operate in this country.
One study, by Reading University, put the number at around 30; the think-tank Civitas estimates there could be 85.
What we do know is that sharia courts are proliferating across Britain and are held in many towns and cities with sizeable Muslim communities.
As the Government review states, critics regard them as anathema to British values because they ‘keep many Muslims isolated, entrenched and with little social stake in wider British citizenship and life’.
As I have discovered, these fears are not without justification. Indeed, so many of the country’s 2.8 million Muslims are using sharia courts that they are convened in all manner of places, from mosques to converted houses and shops. SO
ExACTLY what is sharia law and how is it dispensed? Among many non-Muslims, any mention of sharia instils fear and repulsion. An impression has been shaped by stories from countries in the Middle East, SouthEast Asia and parts of Africa, where it is meted out in its most draconian form, with women flogged or stoned to death for committing adultery on the scantest of evidence, and petty thieves having their hands amputated.
Then there are those sickening internet videos posted by so-called Islamic State, whose barbarity — lest we need reminding — and corruption of Islamic teaching is utterly repugnant to people of the true Muslim faith.
In fact, sharia is a code covering every aspect of life, from the way people dress, eat and handle financial and property matters, to how they behave towards family and others.
Largely derived from the Koran, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and other ancient Islamic scholars, it dates from between the 7th and 10th centuries. One major criticism is that, while the world has changed since then and civil law has moved with the times, the edicts of sharia have remained unaltered.
Sharia law, as practised in Britain, does not handle criminal matters. Under the 1996 Arbitration Act, however, Muslim tribunals are empowered to adjudicate on business and financial disputes, leading to fears that this might be the slippery slope towards wider use of sharia.
A decade ago, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, caused an outcry by suggesting that incorporating elements of sharia into civil law might be ‘ unavoidable’, given the increasingly diverse make-up of the British population.
In recent years, amid mounting concern that many young British Muslims are failing to integrate into mainstream society, the Establishment has largely consigned these liberal views to the past.
Influential voices in politics, the clergy and human rights fear sharia is becoming a ‘parallel legal system’ that furthers social division. They fear it runs counter to a basic principle of our democracy enshrined since Magna Carta: that everyone is equal before the law.
In his new book, Reimagining Britain, Justin Welby, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, says sharia should never become part of the British legal system because it is incompatible with our laws. Disquiet has been expressed, too, by the former government integration tsar, Dame Louise Casey, who found evidence that some sharia councils denied women and children human rights by condoning beatings, marital rape and forced marriage.
In British sharia courts, 90 per cent of the petitioners are female and almost all cases involve divorce.
According to the Home Office, there are many reasons for this. About 100,000 British Muslim couples — more than 60 per cent of the total — are
not legally married, since they have only undergone an Islamic wedding, or nikah, and failed to register their marriages civilly.
In many cases, this is because they and their families only attach importance to the religious ceremony and see no point in solemnising the union for £46 at a register office.
Some Muslim husbands also reject the idea of a civil marriage, because it gives their wives more legal rights.
As sharia permits a Muslim man to take four wives, it also allows men to practise polygamy without breaking Britain’s bigamy laws.
However, when these unofficial marriages break down — all too often because the wives are mistreated — the consequences for women can be devastating.
They cannot go to civil divorce courts, where they might expect equitable rulings on such matters as child custody, the division of assets and ownership of property.
Instead, they are at the mercy of sharia courts, often presided over by imams and scholars who have come to Britain from deeply patriarchal countries with cultures and traditions far removed from the British way of life.
One woman whose story sheds worrying light on the sharia court system is NHS staff nurse Ayesha Khan, 29.
Her Pakistani grandparents moved to Bradford to find work decades ago, but Miss Khan, born and raised here, is a modern Yorkshire woman, forthright and fiercely independent.
Within her community, however, she says it can be enormously difficult to break free of certain centuries-old cultural traditions.
So, in 2013, her father told her she must marry a local man he had chosen for her, but whom she didn’t know, and she had to obey him.
‘To start with, things were fine,’ she told me. ‘ But then [ her husband] became jealous and controlling, the domestic abuse and violence started and it got to the point where I ended up in hospital.’ She added bravely: ‘It wasn’t much, just a broken nose and a lot of bruising.’
Two years ago, she approached the Sharee Council (as it is called) in nearby Dewsbury, expecting that, on hearing her story, it would swiftly grant her a divorce.
As she had only undergone an Islamic wedding and the marriage had not been registered civilly, this was all she needed to be free of her brutish husband. Yet it was the start of a frightening ordeal.
Chaired until recently by the grandfather of Britain’s youngest convicted terrorist, Hammaad Munshi, who was 16 years old when he was arrested after police found a guide to making napalm on his computer, the court is in the predominantly Muslim Savile Town district of Dewsbury, a hotbed of fundamentalism.
The jurists on its sharia council are said by some Muslim critics to be mentored and financially supported by Saudi Arabian Wahhabi fundamentalists and I am told that they have a reputation for delivering hardline and misogynistic judgments.
Their rulings, however, carry such great sway that they are sought by Muslims from across Britain.
On the day of Miss Khan’s case, she was aghast to find that her husband — against whom she had a restraining order granted by a British court — had also been called to give evidence.
‘I’m not a person to be intimidated, but I was that day,’ she said of the traumatic hearing. ‘I was the only woman in the room and it was very scary sitting at this circular table with my husband and being questioned by scholars. They didn’t speak proper English, which made it even worse.
‘ I tried to explain what he’d done, but they just grilled me and made me out to be a liar. My husband made out it wasn’t as bad as I was saying.’
Incredibly, she says, the judges told her to ‘forget’ what he had done and go back to the man who beat her.
‘To the elders hearing my case, the bottom line was that I should forgive him. But I had gone way past that stage.
‘The process was so distressing. They wanted to know all the ins and outs of the marriage, and I had to fight to get my point across. They were obviously more on my husband’s side.
‘They just kept saying, “You need to make up! You need to make up!” But it was way too late for that, and I don’t believe I should have had to justify myself to anybody when there was domestic violence involved.’
The elders refused to grant her a divorce, telling her they needed to deliberate further and that this would be a ‘lengthy process’. She remained in limbo for months.
Desperate to move on with her life, she eventually abandoned the case at Dewsbury and approached a sharia council in Bradford, which claims to interpret sharia in a more progressive manner.
It is presided over by Harun Subhaalni, a personable young religious teacher from a wealthy Bradford Kashmiri family who drives a vintage white Rolls-Royce and hears cases in a rented former estate agent’s office.
MISS Khan says Subhaalni, who is in his 20s, treated her with empathy and quickly granted the divorce.
However, his claim to offer a modern alternative to the brand of sharia handed down in Dewsbury is rather undermined by the shockingly patriarchal posts I found on his council’s Facebook page.
‘The rights of the husband upon his wife are greater than the rights of the wife upon the husband,’ began one, said to have been taken from the Koran. ‘Man is caretaker of his wife and household. He is responsible for all her affairs. He is