Citizenship and the Prophet principle

Review by Caroline Binham

A military coup has thrown Egypt’s experiment with democracy into disarray. From Syria’s rebel-held areas there are reports of whippings and other corporal punishment meted out by sharia courts in recent weeks. So the debate about how Islam interacts with the rule of law and democracy goes far beyond academic kite-flying – in fact, the question is more relevant right now than ever.

Robin Griffith-Jones, master of the Temple Church – probably London’s best-known historical meeting point between religion and the law – has collated arguments by some of the finest theological and legal thinkers into an anthology of 23 essays.

The book’s starting point is the 2008 suggestion by Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, that accommodation between English law and sharia was “inevitable”. The ensuing “storm of protest”, as Griffith-Jones calls it, now seems remote, in light of more pressing questions about Islam and law that have arisen since the Arab uprisings. Chapters devoted to literalist readings of the actual speech compared with the reporting seem by-the-by.

The essays do, however, go much further than this narrow premise. There is a wider discourse about whether an Islamic state can be a democratic one (yes, the writers concur, but not as the European Convention of Human Rights currently construes such a state to be).

This is ostensibly a discussion about legal pluralism; the idea that individuals can be subject to – and might even pick and choose – more than one set of laws by which to abide and be judged. This is not a foreign concept: think of the interplay bet-ween state and federal laws in the US or national and EU laws in the UK.

The focal point here is whether a British Muslim, or indeed a British Jew or a citizen of any faith, should have the right to choose a religious tribunal – of which about 80 exist in the UK catering to Muslims alone – to decide certain legal matters, and the English courts to decide others.

The resounding answer from most of the essayists is no. While family courts, for instance, will take into account a decision of a religious tribunal, just as they now will consider a prenuptial agreement, the ultimate decision on the terms of a divorce lies with the court. Most contributors concur that this calibration is about right – or the least worst option.

The book is at its most engaging when polemic, although there are essential explainers about how English law already accommodates Islamic practice by Lady Butler-Sloss, the former family judge, and Mark Hill, a Cardiff University law professor; and by Ian Edge, from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

It forces a non-Muslim reader to confront stereotypes about sharia. Sharia, “we hear, is about cutting off hands, and that is all. But this is quite wrong,” explains Tariq Ramadan, Oxford’s professor of Islamic studies. Sharia is in fact consideration of a set of scriptural sources by scholars. It is, then, a constantly evolving opinion-based system of jurisprudence.

Albie Sachs, the South African who has been both a prisoner under apartheid and a judge, and Tariq Modood, a Bristol university professor of sociology, tackle the tricky issue of when freedom of speech becomes incitement to religious hatred, with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper taking centre stage.

One of the most memorable chapters is by Shaheen Sardar Ali, born in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, who is a Warwick university professor and a former minister for health in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. In persuasive prose imbued with personal memory, she argues that imams in the UK, because of the effects of immigration and subsequent policy, enjoy a peculiarly high social status – one that would be quite alien in Pakistan and other Muslim countries because Islam does not have an organised clergy as, say, Christianity does.

She also touches on what is a more pressing point for British Muslims than potentially esoteric debates over English law and sharia: their general engagement with the establishment.

“In Coventry, where I live, one of the wards which has the highest Muslim population ... the maternal and the infant mortality rates are the highest in England and Wales,” she writes. “That is where the value systems of Islamic law, the English legal system and human rights all converge. We should be starting with questions of empowerment, health, education and access to resources, empowering Muslim men and women to come in to the mainstream of life in this country ... Other issues – of law and engagement with legal systems – will follow.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.