Sharia family law is reactionary and extremely discriminatory

Rowan Williams’, the Archbishop of Canterbury, horrifying suggestion that aspects of sharia law are ‘unavoidable’ in Britain was naturally welcomed warmly by the unrepresentative and reactionary Muslim Council of Britain. Ibrahim Mogra said: “We’re looking at a very small aspect of Sharia for Muslim families when they choose to be governed with regards to their marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody of children and so forth.”

Williams and Mogra might regard sharia-based family law as a ‘small aspect’, but IKWRO, like many activists of Muslim countries with shria laws’ background, identifies sharia family law as the fundamental basis of the discrimination against women in the Muslim world. Sharia law is deeply and irrevocably discriminatory against women; it is for this reason that no country basing its legal system in sharia law may sign CEDAW without reservations. Mogra’s statement is deceptive in the extreme: ‘when they choose’ he says, as if it is a simple matter to leave Islam, when in fact we know that many of those people born into Muslim households who give up their parents’ religion are harassed and rejected by their communities and families. Thirty-six percent of young Muslims in Britain believe that leaving Islam should be punished by death. In this context, there is no choice involved whatsoever: women will, inevitably, be coerced into accepting judgements which discriminate against them, and women of Muslim background, who already suffer the most within their communities and within British society will have their second-class status codified in law.

Sheikh Michael Mumisa, an Islamic scholar, theologian and academic at Cambridge University believes that “the introduction of personal status laws, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, within the UK will undermine the rights of Muslim women, the poor and anyone who doesn’t really understand Islamic laws. The people who interpret these laws are male scholars and I know from experience that they always disadvantage women. Moreover, some senior Muslim clerics in the UK want more than just the personal status laws and would prefer that the penal laws were introduced as well.” Internationally, sharia law underpins class-based exploitation and gender apartheid, and is condones such atrocities as amputations for petty crime, child marriages, child abuse, polygyny, slavery and the death penalty, including the execution of children, death by public stoning and public decapitation.

What sharia-based personal status law could mean for British Muslim women:

Marriage:

• Marriages require the permission of a guardian, thus preventing a couple from contracting a marriage without parental approval; this will only worsen the problem of forced marriage.
• Marriages can be conducted without the presence of the potential bride, as long as the guardian consents.
• Muslim women may only marry Muslim men.

Divorce:

• Men can divorce simply by repudiation.
• Men have no obligations to support their former wife or her children after divorce.
• Women cannot be divorced without the consent of their husband.
• Abuse is not valid grounds for a woman to end a marriage.

Inheritance:

• Sons will inherit twice as much as daughters.

Child custody:

• Women who remarry lose custody of their children, so therefore a divorced woman is forced to remain single or give up being a mother.
• Child custody often reverts to the father at a preset age, even if the father is abusive.

A recent report by the Civitas think-tank revealed that the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain approved a telephone marriage between a girl of 15 and a mentally handicapped man of forty . The couple had never met before the marriage, and the man’s mother exploited her daughter-in-law by arranging for her to be raped for money. This is an extreme case: but that is the result of these ugly and discriminatory laws. Islam is already used to justify and excuse the sufferings of women subjected to domestic violence, forced marriage, forced child-bearing and endless drudgery. Williams now wants these women, already suffering the most in society, to lose their rights to marry, divorce and raise their children on the same level as other British women.

The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation deplore giving formal status to any form of faith-based arbitration. We have seen the inequities and miseries of sharia law in our own lives, in the lives of our friends, our sisters and our mothers. Rowan Williams thinks that this ‘inevitable’ that this oppression will become as common-place in the United Kingdom as it is in the Middle Eastern countries which we come from. We have a message to Rowan Williams: it is not inevitable. We will fight against it with every means necessary to ensure that there is one law for all British citizens, and that law is based in the principles of universal human rights, including the principles of UNCHR and CEDAW.

IKWRO hereby establish our campaign to say “NO to sharia in Britain.” We urge everyone who cares about human and women’s rights to stand up against Islamic sharia law and support the secular state which is the only guarantor of women’s equality before the law.

Diana Nammi

Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights OrganisationInternational Campaign Against Honour Killings

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7 February 2008