Galloping Towards Sharia

The Telegraph via Samizdata:

Five sharia courts have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester and Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The government has quietly sanctioned that their rulings are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

An example of sharia in action:

Mr Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.

The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.

The news does say that judgment under sharia in Britain is voluntary. So, either these women were somehow coerced or they're really dumb.

Comments

[Kafir]

You have nothing to say about the Islamabad bombing?

[Mike T]

I'm going to go with the former. Muslims who want to live under Sharia don't tend to take an enlightened view toward violence and women disagreeing with them.

[slickdpdx]

These stories are a little overblown in the sense that parties in a dispute can generally agree on any mediators and mediation rules they want to. To say you can't agree to these rules and mediators would (in the U.S.) be an Establishment clause violation. In the UK I'd imagine it would be some form of impermissable religious prejudice.

However, as you note, there may be serious questions regarding whether the parties knowingly and freely choose this form of mediation in a particular case. I imagine the remedy is to go to civil court and move to set aside (or whatever similar process there likely is) the mediation on those grounds.

[Isaac Schrödinger]

Kafir: "You have nothing to say about the Islamabad bombing?"

I had read the terrible news on various blogs and thought that it had enough attention.

These attacks have become too common in Pakistan. For instance: "Pakistan tops the list of countries as far as the number of deaths in suicide bombings during the first eight months of the year is concerned, figures compiled by an elite intelligence agency have said."

There's little I can add to that. A little humor? Pakistanis are great at two things: cricket and terrorism. For the past few years, they've been sucking at cricket ...

[Laura(southernxyl)]

In a population that still performs honor killings in the very face of British law, I'm appalled that British courts are assuming that when women lay aside their British inheritance rights, it's strictly voluntary.