Reforms: Assisting Muslim Women
Shari’a Councils in some cases discussed above conducted mandatory joint mediation to start divorce proceedings in domestic abuse cases resulting in power imbalances. There are many sources but, in this research, the following were discovered: domestic abuse, immigration status, financial situation, abuse of religious authority, litigants in person and inequalities.
The state could support to make informal mediation into semi-formal mediation by encouraging the appointment of a legally qualified mediator or lawyer under English law to work in partnership with Shari’a Councils because this can help to identify power imbalances and maintain impartiality to assess whether mediation is a suitable forum. It would be more appropriate to have an integrated co-mediation model. This would involve an English and Islamic mediator working as co-mediators and adopting egalitarian principles within Islamic mediation.This research seeks to establish trust across two scholarly traditions in order to propose a pilot model for the British context yet rooted in ethical Islamic thought compatible with English principles of law. This model will be based on the egalitarian methodology of A’isha Bint Abi Bakr (Prophet Muhammad’s wife) to minimise power imbalances as it will seek to deliver gender justice and equality. The model will require four key principles to be adopted when mediating: dignity (Sachedina, 2009: 272), justice (Kadivar, 2013), equality (Mir-Hosseini, 2015) and equity (Smith, 1979) derived from the Qur’an which A’isha adopted in her approach (Geissinger, 2011). A’isha was not only an early legal scholar, she was the second largest hadith narrator and a jurist adopting this method and she taught many of the Prophet’s companions egalitarian principles (meaning to remain faithful to sources) and she dealt with many gender issues arising in her time (Spellberg, 1994). These principles can be further developed to place a screening process for domestic abuse victims particularly with reference to egalitarian justice (Kadivar, 2013: 224) from the Qur’an by drawing on earlier judicial judgments in which legal rulings were given but it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore this or A’isha’s methodology (Rabb and Balbale, 2017). This can become compatible with English principles of mediation: voluntary participation, suitability, impartiality, confidentiality.13
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