Report Findings and Recommendations

In February 2018, ‘The Independent Review into the application of sharia law in England and Wales’ was published.⁷ Beyond the general and the more serious concerns regarding sharia councils within Brit­ish Muslim communities, the past three decades have also produced rich ethnographic research including rich descriptions of modes of Muslim religious family law.

The Inquiry findings included:

٠ Muslim women to be the primary users of sharia councils.

٠ The primary motivation for using a sharia council is to obtain a religious divorce.

٠ A significant number of Muslim couples fail to civilly register their religious marriages and therefore some Muslim women have no option of obtaining a civil divorce.

٠ Evidence of good and bad practice within sharia councils was found.

٠ Unanimous agreement among the sharia councils themselves that discriminatory practices occur in some instances within the councils.

٠ Sharia councils are fulfilling a need in some Muslim communi­ties. There is a demand for religious divorce and this is currently being answered by the sharia councils.

• Those proposing a ban on sharia councils provide no counter pro­posal or any solution for anyone seeking a religious divorce.

• If sharia councils are banned and closed down this could lead to councils going ‘underground’, making it even harder to ensure good practice and the prospect of discriminatory practices and greater financial costs more likely and harder to detect. It could also result in women needing to travel overseas to obtain divorces, putting themselves at further risk. The closure of sharia councils is therefore not a viable option.

Further, the set of recommendations included changes to marriage laws, ways in which to encourage integration and to promote equality between religions in ways that should challenge misconceptions of a parallel legal system.

On the question of sharia councils operating as parallel legal sys­tems and potential conflicts between civil law and religious norms in­cluding the question of competing allegiances the Inquiry found that,

Common misconceptions around sharia councils often perpetu­ate owing to the use of incorrect terms such as referring to them as ‘courts’ rather than councils or to their members as ‘judges’. These terms are used both in media articles but also on occasion by the sharia councils themselves. It is important to note that sharia councils are not courts and they should not refer to their members as judges. It is this misrepresentation of sharia councils as courts that leads to public misconceptions over the primacy of sharia over domestic law and concerns of a parallel legal system.⁹

The British Muslim identity therefore reveals important insights into the ways in which community formation and legal regulation and the rights of minority religious communities have taken shape over the past few decades. The chapters in this collection engage both broadly and more specifically with three key recommendations put forward by the Inquiry.