This week Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice advocated that some disputes could be settled on the basis of 'the principles of sharia' rather than English law. Douglas Carswell MP has written a commendable critique of why Lord Phillips has overstepped his constitutional position in making these remarks. What must be of equally great concern is that the Lord Chief Justice appears to have totally misunderstood the very nature of sharia. Put simply, Islamic theology unequivocally states that law cannot be 'made' by people, it can only be 'discovered' by Islamic theologians interpreting the Islamic scriptures (Qur'an and Hadlth). Consequently, when sharia exists alongside any other form of law, the 'man-made' law must always be subservient to sharia.
An example of the superior status given to sharia is slavery - which within the last 50 years has been banned by constitutional law in virtually every country in the world...yet is still present in a number of Islamic countries BECAUSE sharia legitimises the enslavement of non Muslims. An illustration of this happened this very week when Belgium police freed 17 women allegedly held as slaves by members of an Arab royal family residing in Brussels.
In fact, the extent to which political correctness has blinded our eyes to the role of sharia in legitimising slavery is truly astonishing. In the recent celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the British parliament's abolition of the slave trade, we heard very little about the role played by Muslim Arab traders in enslaving large numbers of black Africans prior to their transportation in European ships to the West Indies. Nor did we hear much of the one million white European slaves, many of them British sailors or even Cornish villagers captured in slave raids on South West England, enslaved and sometimes forcibly converted to Islam by the ruler of Morocco in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although we must be grateful to Giles Milton for bringing this subject to public light in his excellent book White Gold
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The truth is that political correctness and the fear of being accused of 'Islamophobia' have kept the Islamic aspect of the slave trade largely veiled from public attention. Yet the express permission granted in Islamic law for the enslavement of non Muslims was a significant factor not just in the eighteenth century transatlantic slave trade, but also continues to be in a number of modern Islamic contexts. The existence of twin system of law in many Islamic countries - one constitutional and the other, Islamic (sharia) often operated on a more informal level - allows those engaged in slavery to claim a degree of 'legitimacy' in terms of Islamic law.
Consequently, while Arab countries have in recent years made pronouncements in terms of their constitutional (i.e. western based) laws banning slavery, in practice slavery has often continued. For example, in November 1962 Saudi Arabia found 'a favourable opportunity' to formally abolish the slave trade, and paid £1,785,000 as compensation to slave owners for the release of 1,682 slaves. Yet the UN estimated that there were between 100,000 and 250,000 slaves in Saudi Arabia at the time. The overthrow of the Sultan of Oman in 1970 revealed some 500 slaves kept in his palace - some so badly treated that they were unable to stand upright while others had become unable to speak. Similarly, Mauritania whose constitutional law abolished slavery in 1981 was estimated in 1995 to have 300,000 'former' black slaves kept in servitude.
The point is simply this, sharia always trumps any man made 'laws' because Islamic theology understands that law cannot be 'made' by man, but only 'discovered' by Islamic scholars from study of the Islamic scriptures. It is therefore against the very nature of sharia, for it to exist - as Lord Phillips suggested this week that the UK should alllow it to - in a subservient position to any form of man made constitutional law. If the Lord Chief Justice does not understand this basic difference between western law and sharia, then he needs to refrain from addressing Muslim audiences on the issue of sharia.
