Reports the Times of London, the battle for a secular government in Britain is over.
ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.
The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.
Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.
Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.
It has now emerged that sharia courts with these powers have been set up in London, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester with the network’s headquarters in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. Two more courts are being planned for Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, whose Muslim Arbitration Tribunal runs the courts, said he had taken advantage of a clause in the Arbitration Act 1996.
Apparently, the Sharia courts are already working wonders on behalf of women dealing with domestic strife and violence.
Siddiqi said that in a recent inheritance dispute handled by the court in Nuneaton, the estate of a Midlands man was divided between three daughters and two sons.
The judges on the panel gave the sons twice as much as the daughters, in accordance with sharia. Had the family gone to a normal British court, the daughters would have got equal amounts.
In the six cases of domestic violence, Siddiqi said the judges ordered the husbands to take anger management classes and mentoring from community elders. There was no further punishment.
In each case, the women subsequently withdrew the complaints they had lodged with the police and the police stopped their investigations.
Siddiqi said that in the domestic violence cases, the advantage was that marriages were saved and couples given a second chance.
Meanwhile, 4,000 Muslim teens dissapear in Britain each year.
Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams seems to have been right on the mark. He caused a firestorm in February when he said that Britain was on a track that would make the incorporation of Sharia into the British legal sytem “unavoidable.”
Dhimmi Watch has some nice background on this development, including some interesting quotes from Siddiqi regarding the benefits these kinds of courts would afford.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Siddiqi was the one who organized the Muslim Action Committee against the Danish cartoons.
