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International News Title: Sharia ‘law is reactionary and extremely discriminatory against women’ Sharia ‘law is reactionary and extremely discriminatory against women’ 15 February 2008 in Campaign, England, Faith, Legal Police, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Women's Group Diana Nammi The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke to judges, lawyers and academics and journalists on “Civil and religious law in England, a religious perspective” on 7.2.08. In a Radio 4 interview previously that day he agreed that aspects of sharia law were ‘unavoidable’ in Britain. This acknowledgement was naturally warmly welcomed by the unrepresentative and reactionary Muslim Council of Britain. Ibrahim Mogra said “We’re looking at a very small aspect of Sharia for Muslim families when they choose to be governed with regards to their marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody of children and so forth.” Rowan Williams discussed human rights and how to deal with religious minorities. The role of the secular law should be to prevent mutually isolated communities and should capture the legal right of human freedom with a market element allowing for competition for loyalties under different religious jurisdictions. Muslim courts, under the civil law could deal with matters for example of the family by alternative dispute resolution. By these procedures subject to appeal in the Higher Courts alternative beliefs in relation to God could relate to other believers and to individuals in the rest of the community. Rowan Williams and Ibrahim Mogra may regard sharia-based family law as a ‘small aspect’, but the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (IKWRO), like many activists of Muslim countries with sharia laws’ background, identifies sharia family law as the fundamental basis of the discrimination against women in the Muslim world, including communities in the United Kingdom. Sharia law is deeply and irrevocably discriminatory against women; it is for this reason that no country basing its legal system in sharia law may sign CEDAW without reservations. Ibrahim Mogra’s statement is deceptive in the extreme: ‘when they choose’ he says, as if it is a simple matter to leave Islam, when in fact we know that many of those people born into Muslim households who give up their parents’ religion are harassed and rejected by their Muslim communities and families. Thirty-six percent of Muslims in Britain believe that leaving Islam should be punished by death. The percentage of young Muslim men taking a hard line on Sharia is increasing. In this context, there is no choice involved whatsoever: women will, inevitably, be coerced into accepting judgements which discriminate against them, and women of Muslim background, who already suffer the most within their communities and within British society will have their second-class status embedded in law. Sheikh Michael Mumisa, an Islamic scholar, theologian and academic at Cambridge University believes that the introduction of special courts “to consider personal status laws, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, within the UK will undermine the rights of Muslim women, the poor and anyone who doesn’t really understand Islamic laws. The people who interpret these laws are male scholars and I know from experience that they always disadvantage women. Moreover, some senior Muslim clerics in the UK want more than just the personal status laws and would prefer that the penal laws were introduced as well”. (The Archbishop was considering only civil law and civil society.) What sharia-based personal status law could mean for British Muslim women: Marriage: * The woman in a marriage requires the permission of a guardian. This prevents a couple from contracting a marriage without parental approval and only worsens the problem of forced marriage. * Marriages can be conducted without the presence of the potential bride, as long as the guardian consents. * Under age and early marriage * Muslim women may only marry Muslim men. Divorce: * Men can divorce simply by repudiation. * Men have no obligations to support their former wife or her children after divorce. * Women cannot be divorced without the consent of their husband. * Abuse is not valid grounds for a woman to end a marriage. Inheritance: * Sons will inherit twice as much as daughters. Child custody: * Women who remarry lose custody of their children, so a divorced woman is forced to remain single or give up being a mother. * Child custody often reverts to the father at a preset age, even if the father is abusive. Islam is already used to justify and excuse the sufferings of women subjected to domestic violence, forced marriage, “honour” killings, forced child-bearing and endless drudgery. Rowan Williams does not appreciate that these women, already suffering the most in society, will loose their rights to marry divorce and raise their children with the same rights as other British women. The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation deplores giving formal status to any form of faith-based arbitration. These Boards will be dominated by men with patriarchal authoritarian attitudes. The real choice of women and their protection as the weaker party are almost impossible to envisage given the informal and domestic arrangements that are the reality in the lives of these women. I and the volunteers have been refugees and have experienced the inequities and miseries of sharia law in our own lives, in the lives of our friends, our sisters and our mothers. We escaped to the UK and set up the Organisation five years ago to help the oppressed women we understand so well. Some cases deal with the experience of wives being locked in their homes which the husbands go to work, others with a level of verbal abuse and physical violence to women and property and of greatest concern “honour” crimes with the ultimate threat or commitment of murder with men of the immediate family, the extended family and even contract killers on the hunt for them. Rowan Williams suggested procedures unwittingly give legitimacy to these practices, most of which take place in the fearful privacy of the home. When they become a matter of criminal law, it is too late for our clients. If formal courts are ‘inevitable’ that this oppression will become as common-place in the United Kingdom as it is in the Middle Eastern countries from which we originate. We have a message to Rowan Williams: it is not inevitable. We will fight against it with every means necessary to ensure that there is one law for all British citizens, and that law is based in the principles of universal human rights, including the principles of UNCHR and CEDAW. The Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation stand for women’s rights and it hereby establish the campaign to say “NO to Sharia Law in Britain”. We urge everyone who cares about human and women’s rights to stand up against sharia law however it is administered. The secular state is the only guarantor of women’s equality before the law. Diana Nammi Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation International Campaign Against Honour Killings
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