In this week's New Statesman, there's an article by Ziauddin Sardar, entitled Can Islam Change, which approvingly documents how Muslims everywhere are abandoning traditional Islamic law in favour of various kinds of "modernity". The article is disturbing, because it plays directly into the hands of the enemies of Islam who demand that we "change" the religion of Allah Almighty, when in fact they would be satisfied with nothing less than its elimination.
In India and Morocco, according to Sardar, "modern" laws are being introduced which are supposedly superior to "traditional" Shari'a, and Islamically justifiable. Notably in India, what has come under attack is "triple talaq", by which a man can irrevocably divorce his wife in a drunken rage, or in anger, or when under threat. This has "inherent absurdities" for Sardar, but this is the Shari'a, by absolute consensus, and it has never been challenged until the enemies of Islam challenged it. As for the drunken rage bit, everyone knows that Muslims are not allowed to drink alcohol, and if he does something rash in a drunken state, it's his own fault. Our shaikh has said that "divorce" is not part of our vocabulary.
In Morocco the attack on Muslim marriage law has struck at both the beginning and the end of marriage. The new Mudawwana increases the age of marriage for women to 18, bans polygamy except where a judge gives his permission, and removes the right of a man to unilaterally divorce his wife. This ignores the reality of marriage and divorce in Islam, which is a marriage becomes a fact when the parties agree to make it so, as long as their agreement is itself Islamically correct. There are rules concerning suitability, which differ from school of thought to school of thought, but a minimum age for the bride is not one of them in any school of thought, nor is the permission of a judge. The Salaf married girls who were much younger than the age of consent in any western country, and by agreeing to the attack by Moroccan crypto-secularists on Islamic marriage law, he falls into the trap set by the kuffar - setting laws which would class the Salaf as criminals. In the case of the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam), this is outright kufr.
In the case of Morocco, the age of marriage for girls is actually higher than that in some countries in Europe! In the UK the age of both consent and marriage is 16, and recently I had to abandon plans to conduct a marriage in Morocco to a 16-year-old lady, which would have been quite legal in the UK if the father had agreed. The new law helps nobody, certainly not the urban intelligentsia who don't marry young anyway, nor the peasantry, for whom early marriage may be a necessity, and has been part of their culture for centuries, even millennia.
Of course, some of the pseudo-Sharia laws which are in place in some countries are unjust and should be reviewed. Nobody could not be horrified by a young girl being punished for being raped, but the answer is a return to genuine Sharia under the control of people who know its ins and outs and are willing to "ward off the hudood by means of ambiguities" as one of the Sahaba (I believe A'isha, radhi Allahu anha) told us, and don't regard large numbers of hand-cuttings and floggings as the mark of an Islamic state. The fact is that our decline began after un-Islamic ideas penetrated our thinking, and we can gain nothing by succumbing to pressure from the enemies of Islam.