Stoning and amputation might grab the headlines, but sharia law is as much a moral code as a legal one, and many in Ireland's Muslim community would like to see it practised here in certain cases, writes Mary Fitzgerald
For Saima it was the only way out of a marriage that had turned into a nightmare. She had met and fallen in love with her husband at university in Pakistan. Her parents were opposed to the marriage because he came from a family less well off than hers. Saima (not her real name) shrugged off her family's concerns and they married in a ceremony she says was religiously sanctioned but not registered.
Fast forward a few years and the couple are living in Ireland. Saima's husband forbids her to work, limits her social circle, and is so strict with the household budget that he calls for an ambulance when she goes into labour with their first child in order to save on the taxi fare. All that she could deal with, Saima says, until the beatings began. Social workers became involved.
Eventually she decided to leave. Because her marriage had no legal basis in Ireland, there was no need for a civil divorce. But as a Muslim woman, it was important to Saima that her marriage was declared over in accordance with sharia law. So she went to South Circular Road mosque in Dublin where the imam, Yahya al Hussein, acts as the Irish point of contact for the London-based Islamic Sharia Council.
The council, which operates out of the back room of a converted corner shop in Leyton, east London, hears at least 30 divorce petitions a month, according to its president Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed. Most of the cases involve couples from Britain, but Sayeed and a panel of other Muslim scholars also grant Islamic divorces to couples from countries including Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands.
Their work is not just restricted to divorce. Every day the council responds to more than a dozen requests by e-mail or phone for a fatwa - a religious injunction - on everything from inheritance matters and whether property and business transactions comply with the Islamic prohibition on accruing interest, to the correct time to start Ramadan and the exact ruling on men growing beards. Though sharia rulings have no basis in law, Muslims voluntarily abide by the decisions and often use them to settle disputes without going to the British courts.
It was this council that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, referred to during his recent controversial speech in which he said the incorporation of certain aspects of sharia law in Britain seemed "unavoidable". He argued that adopting elements of sharia would help maintain social cohesion, sparking a rancorous debate that soon widened into the thorny issue of Muslim integration in Britain.
More than 90 per cent of all correspondence received by the sharia council is related to marital problems, with the majority of applications from women seeking Islamic divorce.
Under sharia law, a husband can divorce his wife in the presence of two witnesses without providing a reason, whether or not his wife accepts it.
She has no such right and must instead apply to have her case heard before a panel of scholars acting as judges.
In many cases heard by the Islamic Sharia Council in London, Sayeed explains, the wife has obtained a civil divorce which is not accepted by the husband. "As a result, she does not feel completely free to enter into another marriage before obtaining an Islamic divorce," he says.
He insists it is wrong to suggest the council, one of several operating across Britain since the early 1980s, presents a challenge to the country's legal system. "We are a complement to British civil courts, not a contradiction," he says. "Many Muslims like a sharia ruling on top of a civil court settlement in order to feel they have done their religious duty."
IT TOOK SAIMA one year to get an Islamic divorce from the sharia council. She explained her circumstances to Imam Yahya, who then spoke to her husband before compiling a report on the marriage, which he sent to the council's panel of scholars for examination.
"Getting an Islamic divorce was important for my conscience and inner peace," Saima says. "If I ever remarried without it, I would be a sinner in the eyes of God."
Her husband fought the process all the way. "He did everything he could to prevent it," she says. "He told me that if I was not with him, then he would make sure I would never be able to marry anyone else."
For the past five years, Imam Yahya has referred Muslims living in Ireland to the council. He says he has dealt with no more than 10 cases - involving Libyan, Iraqi, Pakistani and Nigerian Muslims - in that time. In one case, a woman sought a divorce from the council because her husband had disappeared; in another, a Dublin-based Muslim, whose husband was living in the Middle East, applied for divorce after her husband took a second wife.
"Divorce is not something that is seen as good or encouraged in Islam. The Prophet Mohammed said it was the most detested of all permissible things in the sight of God," Imam Yahya says. "So we talk to both parties to see if there is any possibility of reconciliation. But once a woman decides she does not want to stay married to her husband, there is no rule in sharia that would force her to stay in the marriage against her will."
Sarah Filaih, an Irish woman who converted to Islam before meeting her Iraqi husband, applied for an Islamic divorce through the sharia council after she got a legal separation. The marriage was not working, she says, and they argued all the time.
"I wanted to make sure he knew I was serious about divorcing him," she says. "Plus if I wanted the option of marrying again, I would have to get an Islamic divorce."
She is planning to apply for a civil divorce and complains that the sharia route takes too long for women.
"If a man wants a divorce he can get it easily but if a woman initiates divorce she has to go through the sharia council and argue her case. It can take a long time. I wouldn't recommend it."
It depends on the individual case, says Sayeed. One divorce petition the council received from Ireland involved a woman who was married to a violent, non-practising Muslim. Her Islamic divorce was approved in less than four months and she is now going through the process of civil divorce.
Many in Ireland's Muslim community observed the furore over Dr Rowan Williams's comments with interest. While Muslims in Britain can avail of sharia-compliant banking and the services provided by institutions such as the Islamic Sharia Council, no such facilities exist in Ireland.
One initiative currently being considered by the Irish Council of Imams, an umbrella body of religious leaders set up in 2006, is the setting up of a committee to advise on family-related matters in accordance with sharia.
Sheikh Hussein Halawa, from the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland based at Clonskeagh mosque in Dublin, stresses the committee they envisage would not operate on the same basis as the sharia councils in Britain in that it would not grant Islamic divorce.
"It will look at family affairs, using sharia law as the foundation for sorting out problems," he says. "The number of Muslims in Ireland has increased and with it the number of family issues we are asked to give advice on. Sometimes the Garda come to me regarding domestic disputes involving Muslim couples. This committee will help sort out these family disagreements. You could call it a reconciliation committee."
Ireland's Muslim community is undergoing significant change. It is rapidly increasing in size - the last census reported 32,500 Muslims living here, a 70 per cent increase since 2002, though Muslim leaders say the real figure is closer to 40,000 - and it is becoming more diverse, with African Muslims and those from the Balkans adding to long-established Arab and south Asian congregations. Sheikh Allama Zille Umar Qadri, imam at the Al Hidayah Islamic Cultural Centre in Ongar, Dublin, predicts that as the community matures, it will seek ways of incorporating sharia principles into everyday life.
"Right now the Muslim community in Ireland is a relatively young one so people are preoccupied with settling and putting down roots. These issues will become more pressing in the future as people start thinking how they can make their lives here more sharia-compliant, for example in the area of finance."
Sheikh Qadri believes there should be an Irish equivalent of Britain's sharia councils. "Not everybody is happy with the opinions of the sharia council in London for example," he says. "As the Muslim population of Ireland grows, there will be a need to set up a similar body here. Why should Irish Muslims have to depend on a council in England? There should be something catering specifically for Irish Muslims."
A 2006 poll found that more than a third - 36 per cent - of Irish Muslims surveyed would prefer if Ireland were ruled under sharia law. Some Muslim clerics here play down such findings but say they would favour the introduction of separate sharia-based civil courts that Irish Muslims could use for family-related matters.
"I think it would be the wish of the majority of Muslims to see something like this in Ireland in the future," says Imam Yahya al Hussein from Dublin's South Circular Road mosque. "It is better to take people on board than leave them out. There should be some form of accommodation for family issues in which all parties agree to take part."
SHEIKH QADRI AGREES. He points to the example of India, where each religious community retains its own laws governing marriage, divorce, births, deaths and inheritance. "If it can work there, it could work in Ireland too," he says, "as long as it is restricted to family matters."
Many Muslims argue that there is great misunderstanding of sharia in the West. "The problem is that whenever people think of sharia, they think it is all about stoning and cutting off the hands of thieves," Imam Yahya says. "But it is much more than that. Anyway, these penal codes cannot be implemented in a country with a non-Muslim majority. No one is calling for that."
Nevertheless, there are major areas of conflict between the Islamic approach to equality and human rights and that enshrined in Irish - or British - law that make any integration of sharia, no matter how limited, hugely problematic. Under sharia, women do not have the same rights afforded to them - for example, a woman's testimony carries only half the weight of a man's.
The European court of human rights has twice ruled that sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy, citing its rules on inheritance, women's rights and religious freedom as violating human rights. Apart from that, there is much disagreement within the Islamic world as to the precise nature of sharia, given that there are many different schools of interpretation - a point raised by Britain's Muslim Public Affairs Committee following the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech.
"There are more pressing issues facing Britain's Muslims," it said. "Tabloid editors and archbishops take note."