Julie Bindel has a long article on Sharia versus Muslim women at Standpoint.
The voices of Muslim women who have suffered terrible consequences as a result of sharia taking root in Britain are often silenced. I spoke with a number of women who have had experience of sharia courts.
Fawzia married her husband when she was 16 years old and was divorced eight years later.
The marriage was an Islamic ceremony, and her divorce was eventually granted by a sharia council four years after she first went to see her local imam. Fawzia’s story, and those of numerous other women, should provide a cautionary tale of how sharia courts are gaining creeping acceptance in the UK.
Afzal, the man chosen by her parents to be Fawzia’s husband, was 30 years old and had been married previously. “I had never met him,” Fawzia told me when we met in Hyde Park, her chador covering her tiny frame. “When he started to hit me I thought it was me causing him to do it.” What Fawzia did not know when she married Afzal was his history of violence towards women. The year before he married Fawzia, Afzal had broken his sister’s wrist in an attempt to keep her from seeing her boyfriend, and then attacked his brother’s mother-in-law when she intervened.
“He started hitting me when I was pregnant with my first baby,” says Fawzia, who agreed to meet me through a women’s counselling service, “and it never stopped.”
By the time Fawzia was 20 she had three children and numerous scars from the regular beatings she endured from Afzal, but had nowhere to escape to. She went alone to see her imam, who suggested she speak to a scholar at one of the many sharia councils in London. “I told [the scholar] that I was desperately unhappy, that my children were being neglected, that I could not cope in this marriage. I admitted he hit me. I was told to be a good wife and to make my husband more happy.”
Fawzia was eventually granted an Islamic divorce, which her husband contested, four years later. She had to pay £400, the standard cost for women applying for divorce. Men who apply for divorce to sharia courts are charged just £200.
Well that’s fair and equitable.
Another vociferous critic of sharia courts is Nazir Afzal, the chief prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service in the North-West, who has described the phenomenon of sharia arbitrators who deal with cases of domestic violence as dangerous. Maryam Namazie, of One Law for All, believes that it is now seen as “perfectly acceptable” to defend sharia courts or gender segregation as “people’s right to religion”, even for some feminists, humanists and secularists. “This legitimisation means that institutions like the Law Society think nothing of endorsing sharia law,” says Namazie. “What they don’t realise is that they are institutionalising Islamist values.”
Many British Muslims are critical of the British establishment’s support for sharia. Tehmina Kazi, director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, says sharia councils should be penalised when they try to assume a legal status that they do not have. “I think a lot of people — both Muslim and non-Muslim — are not aware of these issues in any great detail, and do not feel equipped to publicly critique them. Raising awareness of these problems would encourage commentators who might otherwise feel too afraid to speak out.”
It seems incredible that after more than four decades of feminism in the West so many on the Left are willing to sacrifice women’s rights, in particular the rights of Muslim-born women, in the name of so-called religious freedom. Kate Smurthwaite, feminist activist and member of the National Secular Society, believes that all organised religion is detrimental to the rights of women. “Speaking out against sharia law in the UK is often viewed as racist, but nothing could be further from the truth,” says Smurthwaite. “The first victims of sharia are Muslim women.”
This is where Pomofoco goes so wrong – it ignores women like Maryam and Tehmina and Fawzia.
Just because some Muslim women argue that they should be allowed access to the sharia system does not mean we should let it become a part of British law. Habiba Jaan is the founder of Aurat, a support service for Muslim women in the West Midlands. She told me that only a decade ago she rarely heard of sharia courts, but now “they appear to be on every doorstep”.
“This is not an Islamic country, which is why so many of us came to live here. If sharia were to become part of the legal system it would be a disaster for women,” says Jaan. “Many are not even aware of their rights so they think sharia is the proper law.”
That’s a crucial point. This is not an Islamic country, which is why so many of us came to live here.
John Bowen, author of Blaming Islam, is an anthropologist based at Washington University in St Louis. He specialises in comparative social studies of Islam across the world. Bowen has found that Britain is unique in having a well-developed network of sharia courts, and has interviewed imams, scholars and members of the public who access them. He argues that sharia councils do not have any legal power, and are therefore harmless bodies that simply allow people to settle disputes without accessing mainstream courts. I asked Bowen what he thought about such bodies making decisions on divorce when women cite domestic violence. “The accusation is that sharia councils try to bring couples back together, but this is the case with mainstream law, which is why there is waiting time before a divorce, mediation and couples counselling. A reconciliation and a joint meeting of the husband and wife is always urged.”
But under UK law, women do not have to ask for permission from their violent husband, self-appointed community leader or religious representative in order to be granted a divorce. I asked Bowen if he was concerned about women who are frightened of their imam and are told by a sharia court that they must return to a violent husband. “If somebody is given a sharia ruling they don’t like they can just go to the [secular] court and get another,” he replied. But what about those women who are married in Islamic ceremonies, speak little English, and believe that the word of the imam is law?
Bowen’s reply is not recorded. Maybe he didn’t have one.
Sharia is an important tool with which the Islamist movement restricts women’s freedom. There is a link between sharia and the rise of Islamism, including groups like Islamic State or the Muslim Brotherhood. Many, however, whether naively or deliberately, fail to see it. The legitimisation of sharia has a negative effect on women, children and society as a whole. These effects are noticeable from Iraq to Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as in Britain.
In October 2010, the president of the UK Islamic Sharia Council, Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, stated that rape within marriage is “impossible”. Yet in 1991, after decades of campaigning by feminists, the marital exemption from rape was outlawed by the House of Lords, upholding a decision by the Appeal Court. Are we seeing an erosion of all that has been gained by women fighting against patriarchal attitudes, merely in order to appease religious zealots?
But while the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority has withdrawn its endorsement of the Law Society guidance, it remains on the LS website. The LS has ignored the protests from feminists and other human rights campaigner and instead embarked on a robust promotion of sharia, using supporters such as legal academic Maleiha Malik, solicitor Aina Khan and the Oxford-based Islamist Tariq Ramadan. SBS and OLfA have been joined by Gita Sahgal, director of the Centre for Secular Space, and Chris Moos, secretary of the London School of Economics student union Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, in continuing to campaign against the acceptance of sharia. As Maryam Namazie says: “There is no place for sharia in Britain’s legal system just as there is no place for it anywhere. Sharia is based on a dogmatic and regressive philosophy and a warped understanding of the concepts of equality and justice. The Law Society must immediately withdraw its shameful guidance.”
Damn right.
Thank you for this. Now that I’ve read it, I’ve changed my position on the subject (not that anyone else in the world gives a damn what I think about it, but I’ve learned something).
Certainly we give a damn. And thank you for saying so. Maryam & Tehmina & Habiba & co work tirelessly day in and day out to change minds, it’s always good to know when it works.
John Bowen’s attitude is typical for someone with a purely academic connection with a social system. If Bowen or his wife want to get divorced they don’t have to get permission from a religious leader or religious court to proceed. As a result, he hasn’t given any thought to how sharia courts effect the lives of people who aren’t him.
Good article, though anything from Julie Bindel makes me immediately uncomfortable because of her rampant and ongoing transphobia.
I know by now that women aren’t real people in too many minds out there. I know it, and yet crap like this still blows me away. On some level, on most levels, I obviously don’t know it. Amazing, how optional human rights are when applied to women, and only to women. If somebody tried to pull shit like this against blacks? Jews? Inuit? There’d be a mass conniption fit. But when it’s women, they can’t even understand what the problem is with putting complete-utter-garbage-misogyny first. Viz., e.g., Bowen.
(abbeycadabra @4: why not just worry about whether she’s got her thinking straight on the topic at hand? If the subject was about transpeople, you’d have a point. But, honestly, the state of things being what it is, if you want correctness on every parameter before you’ll pay any attention to a person, you may be in danger of having only yourself to talk to.)
Matters of law should be handled by experts in the law within courts of law. It is very sad that this fundamental principle is being eroded in Great Britain.
“It seems incredible” to whom? It seems perfectly credible to me, and most people who while being generally leftist in our politics and attitudes, would be ashamed to be associated with someone like Bindel. (Lest we forget, this woman has firmly stated in a national newspaper that homosexuality is NOT innate – you’re not born gay, you choose it, and it’s a political choice.)
This is, I think, the main problem the Left have connecting with (for want of a better term) Ordinary People. Ordinary People can be brought round to the idea of feminism. It is much, much harder to get them to do so while engaging in the kind of doublethink necessary to be able to say “yes to women’s rights, but if you support the rights of those women, those brown women, then you’re a racist.” Most people, when presented with that position, perfectly reasonably label the person holding it as an idiot. They can then comfortably discount EVERYTHING that person stands for, and you’re back to square one.
#notallontheLeft
What about stupid people generally? People who don’t know you can complain to the police about being burgled, instead of taking it up with Big Vern at number 48? Those women HAVE equal access to the law in this country (the UK). If they choose to consult an imam instead of a lawyer, that’s their guaranteed right to freedom of religion. Isn’t it?
There are a couple of ways of changing it that spring to mind. Break up the mosques and stop the indoctrination, and forcibly educate all the adults who have been so indoctrinated. Or for a longer term solution, simply close all Muslim faith schools, and require attendance of all children at a secular state school where they’ll be told how their religion oppresses them. Of course you’ll have to close the borders to new immigrants…
Any better ideas?
@Gregory in Seattle: perhaps an even more fundamental principle being eroded here is that the law should be the same for everybody? Whatever one can dream up as justification, the practical result of these Sharia courts is that a portion of the UK population slips out of the usual court system to fall — willy nilly — into a law and court system straight out of the Dark Ages.
@sonofrojblake: “What about stupid people generally?”
Are you serious? Are you saying those women are just being stupid?
Simply factually false. NOBODY “slips out” of the usual court system. The law is the same for everybody, as these women would rapidly find if they, for instance, got caught shoplifting. They’d not find themselves, in the first instance, explaining themselves to an imam.
As I said in (8), those women HAVE equal access to the law. But, as the old saying has it, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
They choose, in matters of legal dispute such as divorce, to consult an imam rather than a lawyer. I’m not saying those women are “just” being stupid, but you’re going to have a hard time persuading me that that behaviour is anything other than stupid. As to WHY they’re doing things that are stupid, well, yes, indoctrination, yes, patriarchy, yes, the pernicious evil of religion, yes, their backward, barbarian culture that they emigrated to avoid, and so on.
So, as I say, without banning their patriarchal backward religion or interfering heavyhandedly in their backward, patriarchal culture – how do you fix it?
@Gregory in Seattle, 7
That principle is NOT being eroded in GB. Let’s stay clear on that. Sharia courts have NO equivalence with real courts, any more than “Christian Scientists” are equivalent to real scientists or Doctor Gillian McKeith is equivalent to a real medical doctor. They’re an entirely voluntary mediation service, and nothing more.
@ 12 sonofrojblake
Uh huh. Entirely voluntary. No coercion at all. Thanks for filling us in.
You missed that bit, did you, Silentbob?
LEGALLY, sharia courts have standing. Thus, the “fundamental principle” GiS was eulogising in (7) is not, in fact being eroded at all, and is not in fact threatened in any way. The coercion IS present, as I said, at length, but it is not LEGAL coercion. The British state and legal system do NOT recognise sharia courts as anything other than a voluntary method of resolving disputes among people who choose to use them, in much the same way as couples with relationship problems may seek the help of Relate, a counselling charity, before resorting to divorce lawyers.
The existence of Relate does not mean women can’t go to divorce lawyers.
@abbeycadabra, before you accuse Julie Bindel of rampant transphobia, please check if you aren’t confusing her with Julie Burchill.
@sonofrojblake, there are women who are deliberately kept away from official help – they are not even aware of their rights in British law. Their ‘choice’ is not really voluntary.
@ S Mukherjee, 15:
F. F. S.
How many times? I GET THAT THEY DON’T HAVE A REAL CHOICE. The point is, the choice is not being denied them by the state, by the real courts, by the indigenous culture, nor is there any suggestion it ever will be. The point is that what Gregory In Seattle said in post 7 is wrong in every respect.
S Mukherjee @ 15
Both Bindel and Burchill are notoriously anti-trans. Burchill’s most famous anti-trans screed even name-dropped Bindel as a comrade-in-arms against the horrible trans hordes.