Denis MacEoin misrepresents the Shari’ah again
Yakoub Islam drew my attention to Denis MacEoin's promotional piece for his Shari'ah-bashing report for Civitass, published on Comment is Free. It contains a series of stupid misrepresentations of aspects of the Shari'ah, obviously intended to deceive his non-Muslim readership. Any Muslim who has read a few basic books on the subject knows that his interpretations are baseless.
Sharia is only marginally about how a believer prays, fasts, pays the alms tax, or performs the pilgrimage.
These are, in fact, the aspects of Shari'ah which affect every Muslim every day of his or her life. This is not 'marginal' at all, except for someone who is perpetually getting into disputes with their spouse or anyone else and doesn't pray much.
If a Muslim man in a fit of temper uses the triple divorce formula, even if his wife is not present, the law considers the couple divorced. But if he comes to his senses, he cannot simply resume relations with his wife. In order to remarry, she must wait three months to determine that she is not pregnant. Thereupon, she is obliged to marry another man and to have sex with him, and this man must then divorce her (or not, if he decides to keep her). She must then wait another three months, after which her first husband may remarry her – see also Ask Imam). This revolting practice, known as halala, demeans the woman. In British law, it would be considered a form of coercion into unwanted sexual relations. Is this what the archbishop wants?
What he fails to point out is that Islam actually forbids this practice. There is a hadith in which the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) cursed the man who marries a woman for this purpose and the first husband. If MacEoin has evidence of women getting coerced into this arrangement, he should present it; otherwise, it's just a supposition. MacEoin linked two fatwas from "ask-imam.com" from this paragraph, both issued by Ebrahim Desai of South Africa, who did not adequately explain that marrying again solely for the purpose of returning to the first husband is forbidden (which I believe he knows).
If couples do not marry according to UK civil law (and I have seen a fatwa ruling that they need not register their marriage with the British authorities), there may be serious consequences in the event of divorce; in the custody of children (which always goes against the woman); with respect to alimony (a man does not have to pay any, except for the children) and with regard to rights to a share in the family home (which a woman does not have).
Custody does not always go against the woman; the father has the primary right to custody of older children in the Hanafi madhhab; in the Shafi'i, the older child is allowed to choose, while in the Maliki, custody of older girls remains with the mother. It is right that the husband does not pay alimony; among the functions of the mahr (dowry) is to provide the wife with security in the event of a divorce, as once the marriage ends (or, rather, once the waiting period ends), the husband has no responsibility for his ex-wife. As for the wife having a share in the family home, she has a share if she contributed to buying it; if the husband bought it out of his wages, or it is his ancestral home, it is his. In Islam, both parties keep what they brought to the table. There is none of this nonsense of wives being able to claim hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from their ex-husbands for life.
The Leyton-based Islamic Shariah Council has issued rulings including one that forbids a woman of any age to marry without a male "guardian"; another that says a man only has to intend to divorce for it to be valid;
The actual fatwa says that if a man uses words other than "I divorce you", then whether the wife is divorced or not depends on what he intended. It does not mean that the marriage can be ended by the husband merely thinking something.
There are a few other points which are simply Islamic rulings which MacEoin does not like, and the real reason he wants recognition for Islamic tribunals withdrawn is because he does not agree with their rulings, and believes his audience will as well. Of course, Shari'ah tribunals' authority to decide matters such as child custody are subject to court rulings, and if a wife objects to a husband taking custody on the grounds that he is abusive (to him or them), she is free to take the matter to the family courts. In fact, British courts have been known to throw out pre-arranged divorce arrangements such as "clean break" settlements.
Ultimately, it depends whether we want to allow minority religious groups — or even majority ones — to settle their affairs amongst themselves, or require them to bring everything to the civil courts. This, of course, might prove rather expensive. The continual harping on the "injustice" of the Shari'ah shows that the real agenda is hatred for Islam, because if he was concerned for women's rights, he would mention the well-known phenomenon of "agunot" or "chained women" in the Jewish community, i.e. women who cannot remarry because their husbands refuse to give them a divorce even though the marriage is no longer functioning. They do this out of spite, and the Beth Din will not do anything about it, while Islamic councils can. Catholicism, meanwhile, achieves equality in matters of divorce by refusing it altogether, even where the husband is beating up the wife. Of course, if all divorcing couples were required to bring their affairs to the courts, it could easily lead to more acrimony, to more money for the lawyers, and for fathers altogether unable to see their own children because their mothers find meeting them for contact "too stressful". When the secular divorce and family courts are the most frequent source of legal contoversy in this country, how is it more just to prevent communities from settling their affairs without recourse to them?
