Another baseless MacEoin report - this time on Shari’ah councils
Denis MacEoin has published yet another of its Islam-bashing reports, this time attacking “Shari’ah courts” in the UK, or rather, Muslim arbitration tribunals (more here). The Daily Mail led this morning with the revelation that “Britain has 85 Sharia Courts”, which quotes the Civitas director David Green as alleging that “for many Muslims, sharia courts are in practice part of an institutionalised atmosphere of intimidation, backed by the ultimate sanction of a death threat”, a fantasy based on prejudices about “how Muslims behave”, with no need for actual evidence.
This seems to be yet another pamphlet composed out of the findings of a trawl across the internet. The press release tells us that “it is extremely difficult to find out what goes on in these courts, so MacEoin reproduces a range of fatwas issued by popular online fatwa sites, run out of or accessed through mosques in the UK”. So his findings are based on online fatwas not issued by the same people who run the panels. Clever.
The fatwas they produce are not exactly news: a woman cannot marry a non-Muslim, for example, or that “a woman may not leave her home without her husband’s consent (which may constitute false imprisonment)”, which in fact it may not at all, because false imprisonment means physically preventing someone from leaving. I suspect that he gathered these fatwas from all over the place, because some of them are normal Islamic law, some are cultural understandings which are commonly presumed to be Shari’ah, and some are way-out rulings which must have been sourced from the extremist minority. The claim about who gets custody of children in the case of a divorce is simply not true of actual Shari’ah, even though it may be what is practised in some Muslim countries; the Islamic law text Reliance of the Traveller states that the mother has first refusal, and female maternal relatives come afterwards; older children are allowed to choose, as long as both parents are suitable.
There are some plain false accusations in the press release. For example, they allege that the Ontario Arbitration Act was abolished after Muslim women “argued that they had gone to Canada to get away from sharia law and the coercion it embodied”. In fact, they were mostly Iranian communist exiles and a small clique of media-promoted “Muslim” secularists (the leader of that outfit is male). That law had existed for decades and been used by Jews and Christians, whose own marriage laws are often less egalitarian than the Shari’ah.
Until I see the pamphlet myself (which I won’t as long as I have to pay for it), I can’t answer every claim made in it, but the press release makes it clear that MacEoin has not done any proper research. Of course, Shari’ah tribunals might not let him sit in on them, but family courts in this country are held in private to date also (although there are plans to change this), and most of the cases they handle are likely to be very uninteresting petty property disputes. However, it’s likely that the report is aimed at people who do not care about whether most of what’s in it is true or not. There’s only one word for the intellectual status of a ‘scholar’ who persistently produces reports based on no relevant evidence: bankrupt.
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Tags: civitas, shari'ah courts, think tank
MacEoin has published a vile blog promoting his lame report on Guardian CiF:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....ia-britain
If MATs are not legal, then what about the Jewish Beth Din ‘courts’? They both seem to have the same status. So either they are both legal, or both are illegal.
’ “a woman may not leave her home without her husband’s consent (which may constitute false imprisonment)”, which in fact it may not at all, because false imprisonment means physically preventing someone from leaving.’
You don’t have a problem then with the idea that ‘“a woman may not leave her home without her husband’s consent’” then?
There should be no religious courts period. There should be one law for all the people living in the country and it should be secular.
There is only one law for people living in this country. These courts have no jurisdiction - all they can do is advise what the course of action should be, in the case of disputes and such like, for those who wish to comply with their religious beliefs.
Anyone who consider it wrong to offer advice, unless it co-incides with their own opinion is latently a tyrant. Maybe they are one already.
If they took it upon themselves to take vigelante action, or to arrest people, then try and punish them, that would be an entirely different matter.
I’m not sure I’d equate a fatwa with simple advice. When Sharia law permits a man to beat his wife, etc., she clearly can be intimidated by her husband. So what is the likelihood that she would run to the British legal system for remedy in family disputes?
Even if these tribunals were completely fair and equitable, their results apparently are never reviewed by British courts unless some complaint is made. So in that sense, they are secretive.
Why allow even the question of secret, unfair resolutions to occur when the whole matter could be decided by legitimate British law?