Divorce Sharia Style
C4 Sunday 3 February 2008 at 7.15pm
Repeated 4.25am (early hours of Monday)
Introduction
This Channel 4 programme looks at Britain’s busiest Sharia council to see what this Muslim legal institution offers couples in conflict and to ask whether religious laws should be recognised by the secular British legal system.
In some countries where the majority of people are Muslims, family laws are based on Muslim laws – Sharia. According to a 2006 poll in Britain, 40% of Muslims now want Sharia to be a part of British law in predominantly Muslim areas.
Rising divorce rates
In practice, Muslim laws are already being used here, in parallel with the British legal system. Many Muslims ask a Sharia council to help them sort out their problems and to make rulings on conflicts in their lives. Marriage breakup makes up 95% of the councils’ work as the divorce rate rises among a generation of Muslims who are straddling two societies and trying to distinguish between religious law and cultural traditions. The bulk of these cases are of women seeking divorce.
A Muslim woman has the right to ask the councilto dissolve her marriage if her husband treats her with physical or mental cruelty (among many other grounds). If these grounds are established, the husband must give her compensation. Under Muslim laws, a woman also has the right to ask the court to dissolve her marriage even if she has no grounds, but then provided she compensates her husband. This latter is called ‘khula’.
The meaning and procedure for khula varies between different Muslim countries. Some say it requires the husband’s permission and others not. In classical Muslim jurisprudence, it is a divorce initiated by the wife without needing to establish any grounds and is based on a story about a woman who asked the Prophet’s ruling on the problem that she simply found her husband repulsive and wanted to end her marriage. The Prophet dissolved the marriage but ordered her to return to him the orchard he’d given her as a marriage gift.
If a husband and wife divorce in a civil court, this is recognised by the Sharia councils, but a ruling by a Sharia council is not recognised by courts in Britain or Muslim countries abroad. Many religious Muslims, though, want the Sharia councils to authorise their divorce as well as obtaining a civil divorce, and consider its judgments to be divinely sanctioned.
Two of the cases explored in Divorce Sharia Style raise some of the issues they deal with.
State recognition
The Sharia Council, based at Regents Park Mosque in London, is the oldest such institution in the country. Its scholars or sheikhs have been ruling on all aspects of Muslim life for 25 years. The Council has been trying to get Muslim personal laws recognised by the state but claims that all its attempts to engage with the Government have led nowhere.
Senior Judge and Secretary of the Council, Sheikh Hassan, says: ‘We know that if Sharia laws are implemented then you can change this country into a haven of peace. Because once a thief’s hand is cut off, nobody is going to steal. If only once an adulterer is stoned, nobody is going to commit this crime at all. There would be no rapist[s] at all. This is why we say that, yes, we want to offer it to the British society. … And if they don’t accept it, they would need more and more prisons.’
Whether or not they get state recognition – and however extreme Sheikh Hassan’s views are seen to be – more and more Muslims are turning to the council for religious rulings.
