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This chapter focuses on the fears and accusations about the English law's recognition of shariʻa. In his February 2008 remarks, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams explored ways in which the legal system might “recognise shariʻa.” Despite the storm of media criticism, he was joined later that year by Britain's highest justice, Lord Phillips, in saying that English law should recognize certain elements of shariʻa. It is in the domain of family law where suggestions that private Islamic bodies might take on a function of the civil courts raise the greatest degree of legal and social concern. Although some Islamic scholars have urged Parliament to create formal linkages between law courts and Islamic shariʻa councils, these councils carry out no actions that have the force of state law. For the moment, then, the main possibility for legal “recognition” of Islamic law in England would be if civil courts were to act on some elements of an Islamic divorce proceeding.

This chapter provides the background to the shariʻa councils and explains why Islamic divorce has become the focus of shariʻa council practices. In 1982, a collection of Islamic scholars met in Birmingham to create a new Britain-wide shariʻa council. The scholars had hoped to deal with a wide range of religious issues, from banking and mortgages to standards for halal food. However, few of these issues were brought to their doors. As one of the founding scholars, Suhaib Hasan, said later, “We intended that the council provide decisions for the Muslim community on any and all matters, but pretty soon it became clear to us that we were spending all our time giving women divorces. This was not what we set out to do, but there was a vacuum in the community and we filled it.” When a marriage has broken down, ways must be sought to allow the woman and the man to remarry.

This chapter discusses how Islamic institutions are keeping Muslims from fully integrating into English, or British, society. Some Islamic institutions deeply trouble at least some non-Muslims in Britain; others do so much less. Shariʻa councils are accused of threatening legal unity, oppressing women, and encouraging Islamic radicalism and domestic violence. But other institutions, despite the clear role of shariʻa, are relatively accepted. The chapter then considers two kinds of Muslims. Liberal or “moderate” Muslims fit in by adapting to English behavior and by embracing what are claimed to be modern British ideas about gender roles. By contrast, conservative Muslims don't shake hands, live by themselves in Leicester or Dewsbury, and might promote extremism. Ultimately, shariʻa councils and Muslim schools have become the major objects of broad British fears about domestic Islam. Both seem to cross boundaries in a way that threatens the unity of Britain, or of England.

This chapter focuses on the anxiety of performativity, which asks about the capacity of scholars or judges to successfully perform an Islamic act and to divorce a couple. Performativity can be distributed in differing ways between religious and state authorities. People are used to the idea that a religious marriage may have legal effects, because in many countries such is the law. Conversely, in many countries with Islamic courts, a court divorce is also—immediately and automatically—an Islamic divorce, because the laws say so. The shariʻa councils do not have that legal legitimacy. No state laws back them up, and the religiously performative quality of their acts is nowhere made explicit. Ultimately, the uncertainties around shariʻa council performativity point toward a much broader problem regarding the capacity of a state to say when a religious act has taken place.

This concluding chapter examines the concentration of British Muslims within British locations. Concentration of people with similar pasts, old-country anchors, and theological tendencies makes it possible to draw rings around one's own group, and to build bridges back home without sensing a need to do so with those next door. But even if some Islamic public actors have seen little reason to move away from established modes of reasoning and practice, and the very welcoming soil of Britain has encouraged them to reproduce older forms, doing so in a new context has inevitably led to social transformations—all the more as the new contexts shift in response to these efforts. Indeed, the shariʻa councils are not replicas of anything existing today or yesterday in South Asia but an effort to create—on the basis of remembered social forms but in a new social context—mechanisms to respond to British Muslims' demands.

This chapter examines the everyday practices at the Islamic Shariʻa Council, London (ISC). ISC scholars do what judges do in courts throughout the world: they try to arrive at a reasonable outcome in a way that is consistent with their own procedures and with their understanding of the relevant law. However, the ISC scholars do so in a global context of Islamic jurisprudence and of transnational movement: clients come to them from dozens of countries, many of them will return to those (or other) countries, and from time to time Islamic scholars from prestigious religious faculties drop in to observe. Understandably, the scholars on this and other councils discuss whether their practices fit with those of Muslim-majority countries and with positions taken by those prestigious Islamic scholars.

This chapter looks at the Birmingham Central Mosque's council, where women take the lead. The Birmingham council began as a place for women to find advice and help, and only later transformed itself into a shariʻa council. Women may come or call for a variety of reasons. However, many who contact them regarding a divorce are turned away because of a rule adopted several years previously by the council. The council had been hearing all cases where a woman wished to end her marriage, until one day when they granted a woman her religious divorce, only to have her turn around and stop cooperating with her husband on the civil divorce. This unfortunate consequence of their divorce judgment led the council to only accept cases where the civil divorce—if one was needed—had been completed, so that women could not keep their husbands from remarrying.

This chapter assesses what happens when one constructs a shariʻa council within an explicitly and visibly Sufi world. In the Hijaz community, the current leader and sheikh, Faiz ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, dispenses advice and blessings to Muslims living in Britain and, sometimes, abroad. He is also a barrister and has sought to include the mediation activities of his Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT) within the community. If the London ISC scholars seek to base their legitimacy on correct following of jurisprudence and adherence to explicit procedural rules, MAT is based on Sufi sanctity. Here, shariʻa, understood in the broader sense of God's plans for Muslims, is invoked in much less court-like ways. Because the specific difference of Hijaz regards the multiple activities of its sheikh, and because Hijaz is indeed so different from the other cases, the chapter begins with a broader account of legitimacy and practices in the institution.

This chapter addresses the anxiety of justification, which asks about the selection among competing types of argumentation and the challenge of arriving at a common judgment from diverse starting points. This challenge is exacerbated for a British shariʻa council, as it lacks a shared set of laws or jurisprudence on which to base decisions. Each scholar has his or her own repertoire of texts and traditions, practical knowledge (of Britain, Pakistan, or elsewhere), and ideas about rights and fairness. They have different educational histories and have developed individual theological allegiances to different Islamic legal schools and to different ways of interpreting scripture. They also differ in what legal scholars call judicial temperament: how to weigh multiple criteria, such as the value of precedent, the practical effects of a decision on litigants, and the intent of lawgivers. The chapter then explores the moral, theological, and epistemological debates regarding the practice of justification.