Saturday, October 20, 2012

British Parliament Learns That Sharia Courts Are Sometimes No More Consensual Than Rape

I'm confused. Some British leaders are concerned that women are being treated unfairly in British Sharia courts. Don't they realize that Sharia demands unequal treatment for women? If so, don't they understand that it's wrong and immoral to impose Western values on Muslims? The real problem, after all, is Islamophobia, not the rampant abuse of Muslim women.

The Telegraph--Muslim women in Britain are being forced to “live in fear” because of the spread of unofficial and unregulated sharia courts enforcing Islamic rules, the House of Lords was told.

Rulings by informal religious “councils” and tribunals are sometimes no more “consensual” than rape, peers were told.

The warnings came in the first ever full Parliamentary debate on the subject in the UK. Baroness Cox, the independent peer and Third World campaigner, last year tabled a private member’s bill in the Lords setting out plans to rein in a network of unofficial self-styled “courts” which apply Islamic principles.

One study estimated that there are around 85 Sharia bodies operating in Britain, although there is no official estimate.

They include legally recognised arbitration tribunals, set up primarily to resolve financial disputes using Islamic legal principles but which have taken on a wider range of cases.

There is also a network of informal Sharia “councils”, often operating out of mosques, dealing with religious divorces and even child custody matters in line with Islamic teaching.

The bill, which had its first full debate yesterday, would make it a criminal offence for such bodies to style themselves as courts or those chairing them to pose as judges. It would also limit the activities of arbitration tribunals and explicitly require them to uphold equality laws including women’s rights.

Baroness Cox told the House of cases she had encountered including a woman who had been admitted to hospital by her violent husband who had left her for another woman but still denied her a religious divorce so she could remarry.

Another woman was forced to travel to Jordan to seek permission to remarry from a seven-year-old boy whom she had never met because she had no other male relatives, she said.

A third who came to see her was so scared of being seen going in that she hid behind a tree while another told her: “I feel betrayed by Britain, I came to this country to get away from all this but the situation is worse here than in my country of origin."

Baroness Cox said: “These examples are just the tip of an iceberg as many women live in fear, so intimidated by family and community that they dare not speak out or ask for help.” (Continue Reading.)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Shariah courts enforce Shariah law. WHY is it so hard to people to understand that Shariah law is NOT Western law? Shariah law enforces the Islamic principles found in the Qu'ran and the Sunnah (Mohammad's example), such as women are not equal to men.

Reliance of the Traveller (Shariah law): http://www.shafiifiqh.com/maktabah/relianceoftraveller.pdf