Women & Sharia Law in the UK

By Aaron Goldstein
10.27.11

Reid Smith seeks to enlighten us on the question of Sharia law. But curiously he omits one of the central tenets of Sharia law - that the word of a woman is half that of a man.

Yet Smith is correct to say that we might be surprised by the number of countries which use Sharia law. Which brings me to the United Kingdom. As of 2010, there were just under 2.9 million Muslims in the U.K. comprising 4.6% of that country's population. In less than a decade, Britain's Muslim population has increased by nearly 75%.

Thus it should not come as a surprise that there are a network of Sharia courts in Britain and their rulings are legally binding. According to a study released in 2009 by Civitas, a British think tank, there are 85 Sharia courts in the UK. Some of these Sharia courts have issued rulings which are incompatible with British and European law including rulings forbidding marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims, ordering the removal of children from the custody of Muslim women who marry non-Muslim men, compelling women to have sex with their husbands and sanctioning polygamy. This past June, Baroness Cox introduced legislation in the House of Lords to rein in the Sharia courts requiring them to uphold the supremacy of British law. However, even if the bill is approved in the House of Lords it is not expected that the Cameron government will make it a priority in the House of Commons. the rest