When I first heard the comments of the Archbishop of Canterbury on Radio 4’s Today Programme, I was pleasantly surprised. Here was someone who’d studied what the Sharia means to Muslims, and had taken the misleading popular media images of it out of the equation. As someone who has been studying Islamic Law for several years as part of my degree, my reaction to the recent storm generated in the media, and in particular the tabloids, over Dr Rowan William’s comments about Sharia has been much like the Archbishop’s himself — one of shock.When he first spoke of the introduction of civil courts that would deal with marital disputes, and perhaps financial transactions, I thought it was about time that these interactions finally gained some state recognition, having been taking place among Muslims in British society for many years, so that, for instance, a couple who have gotten married under the auspices of an Islamic court do not have to register separately at a registry office for their union to be recognised by the state.The extraordinarily negative public response made me realise that this would not be easy to achieve. The main problem for Muslims who would like to see the introduction of such bodies is one of the public perception of the Sharia, or Islamic Law. Originally referring to a ‘path to water’, the term Sharia evokes very negative images of degrading public floggings and the like in the popular consciousness.
Undoubtedly these aspects did make up the penal code in classical formulations of the Sharia, but to focus on them exclusively, as is popular even in the more responsible media outlets, is to misrepresent. For instance, in one classical textbook on Islamic Law, out of a thousand pages, only forty are devoted to the penal code. In any case, neither the Archbishop, nor any of the leading Muslim intellectuals supporting him, like Oxford Theologian Tariq Ramadan, are for a moment advocating the patently absurd suggestion that those aspects of the Sharia be introduced into British society.In all of this, it is worth stepping back for a moment, and asking: ‘what exactly does Sharia mean to Muslims?’ As Tariq Ramadan stated on Newsnight last week — and he is certainly representative of the attitudes of large swathes of Muslims living in the West — among the aims and principles of the Sharia is achieving justice, and with the current legal system fulfilling that, Muslims can be content to live under a system that conforms with the norms of the Sharia. The same is taught by Oxford’s other Islamic Theologian, Yahya Michot.Other aspects of Sharia include a Muslim’s personal relationship with God, and so entails things like praying five times a day, not eating pork, and avoiding alcohol: things that are perfectly possible to be fulfilled by Muslims in this country. As for the penal code, as UCLA Law Professor, and expert on Islamic Law, Khaled Abou El Fadl points out in a very brief article of his, the penal code is frequently designed, as in the case for severe traditional punishments for sexual misdemeanours, to make a moral point rather than for implementation, and as such, it is almost impossible to carry out, given the burden of proof required. According to Akram Nadwi, of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, yet another local intellectual colossus on the subject, we do not have any records in history (until modern times) of anyone being punished for adultery due to the virtual impossibility of fulfilling the demands of proof required of the Sharia. A clip of the sort of help British Sharia courts are providing women in more conservative Muslim communities in the North can be found on www.bbcnews.com, in the article, ‘The view from inside a Sharia court.’Usaama al-Azami is the President of the Islamic Society.
What the Sharia means to Muslims
