Berkley Center

According to a 2011 study by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, the number of Muslims living in the United Kingdom is slated to nearly double in the next 20 years, rising from an estimated 4.6 percent of the population today to approximately 8.2 percent in 2030. This increased presence of the religious other in a society where citizens increasingly identify as atheist or agnostic has been an important component of the marked tension between religion and secularism in British society.

Recently, one of my professors invited British solicitor Aina Khan to speak about a particular manifestation of this tension: the existence of sharia and Islamic law in England. Ms. Khan is a specialist in family law and deals primarily with Muslim clients who are seeking to reconcile some of the differences they have encountered between English common law and their personal religious traditions. Because English common law and sharia each have their own ways of handling matters of the family, adherence to one and not the other often (unknowingly) leaves many Muslims in a legal gray area.

According to Ms. Khan, in some Muslim communities as many as 80 percent of Islamic marriages are not legally registered, precluding Muslim couples from their marital rights. In many cases, couples simply assume that the imam they have chosen to marry them in a religious ceremony is also registered to do so under English law. Similar issues surface in divorce cases. How do you approach the divorce of two people who were never legally married in the first place? What happens if a couple is granted an English divorce but the husband, who in some interpretations of Islamic law is the only party with the power to grant a divorce, refuses to leave his wife on grounds of sharia? Despite numerous complexities, Ms. Khan is very hopeful that English common law and sharia can coexist, respecting both the secular legal tradition in the United Kingdom and the religious convictions of new Muslim communities.

In fact, Ms. Khan believes that the generation of Muslim citizens currently under the age of 40 is especially keen on finding this middle path between English and Islamic law. “We love all our cultural baggage,” she says, but she also emphasizes that “Islam is a breathing, living faith” that is able to stretch and adapt to fully function under the umbrella of English law. Ms. Khan suggested some solutions going forward, such prosecuting imams for non-registration, and a greater inclusion of female representatives on sharia councils—bodies that, though having no power of enforcement, frequently give opinions on matters of Islamic law to individuals who are trying to navigate the gray areas.

The example of sharia in the English legal context is truly a microcosm of a much broader discussion about assimilation, multiculturalism, the separation of church and state, and the compatibility of Islam with liberal democracy. The world is getting smaller, and the viewpoints of different cultures are increasingly bound to intersect. The point here, however, is that they are not necessarily bound to clash. With the right amount of creativity and respect, it is very possible that two fundamentally different systems can complement each other to create one coherent whole.