Apparently there is a loophole in British law which can allow Muslim shariah courts to exist, hand down verdicts, and have their rulings enforced by Britain's civil courts. Five British cities have had shariah courts in operation since last summer with over 100 cases decided upon. Most involve marriage and inheritance, but a few have involved domestic violence which is a criminal matter and the courts hope to expand their powers to other criminal cases as well.

The existence of shariah courts in Britain is nothing new — they've been around in one fashion or another for years — but the crucial difference now is the fact that their rulings must be enforced by the state. What this means is that Muslims who don't trust the civil state to give them the justice they seek will try to find justice with religious leaders, who will then turn around and have the civil state enforce their religious rulings.

A civil, secular state using the force of law, courts, and police to impose religious rules and rulings on the population? Even religious believers probably regard that as hypocritical, but for some it's merely a first step towards a larger goal. The Centre for Social Cohesion recently conducted a survey of Muslim students in Britain and found that 40% supported the introduction of sharia law in the UK and 33% want sharia-based government and rules the entire world.

The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal panels, set up by lawyer Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, are now operating in London, Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham and Nuneaton, with more planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh. Mr Siddiqui said: 'We realised that under the Arbitration Act we can make rulings which can be enforced by county and High Courts.

'The Act allows disputes to be resolved using alternatives like tribunals. This method is called alternative dispute resolution, which for Muslims is what the sharia courts are.'

Source: Daily Mail

Is it merely a coincidence that rulings in shariah courts generally favor men while women tend to lose out? No, I don't think so — the inferior status of women is written deeply into Islamic tradition, just as it is in Christian tradition, Jewish tradition, and other religious traditions throughout human history. The long, hard slog of western societies to shed those traditions is now being undermined by Islam, where little or no work on that goal has been made:

Cases handled by the courts so far include Muslim divorce and inheritance to nuisance neighbours, he said. But as well as civil disputes they have also handled six cases of domestic violence. In all six cases, he said, sharia judges ordered husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders, but issued no further punishment. All the women subsequently withdrew their complaints to the police, who halted investigations.

Mr Siddiqui claimed the advantage was that marriages were saved and couples given a second chance. But critics fear Muslim women victims will be pressured into accepting a sharia court settlement, and husbands will escape with lighter punishments than in a mainstream criminal court.

I shudder to think about what other sorts of criminal cases these shariah courts will want to take over next. Why not "honor killings," since they are just bigger versions of domestic violence cases? If the woman violated religious norms and the men are fulfilling religious obligations by murdering the uppity female, then why shouldn't the case be ruled on by religious authorities who have the education and power to determine if the killing was religious justified?

It's not just domestic violence where men are being treated better than women; this is something that can occur in any domestic issue. The above story references an inheritance dispute where a Muslim estate was split among five children: two sons and three daughters. Each of the sons received twice as much as each daughter, an outcome that would have been unthinkable in a civil court where each child is treated equally.

Perhaps it's supposed to be a sign of advancement that the boys were only treated as being worth twice as much as the girls, but it's really just a sign of how far traditional Islam has to come before it reaches the basic standards of equality and justice which are critical (if not always upheld) in secular, liberal modernity. Because they fail to uphold basic standards of equality and justice, though, shariah courts are necessarily inferior to secular courts and their decisions should not be enforced by the state.