Where did the practice note on sharia succession rules come from, Yasmin Rehman of the Centre for Secular Space (and a fellow of the Muslim Institute) asked protesters outside the Law Society yesterday.

What possessed the Law Society to issue this guidance?

Muslim women hadn’t asked for it, she told us. And in an interesting passage on the messages bodies like the Law Society can send to British Muslims, she said

on one level we’re told to integrate, we’re told to be part of British society, and on the other hand we’ve got the apparatus of the state saying if you’ve got a family dispute, go to a sharia council, if you want to educate your children, send them to a faith school … and now, if you’ve got issues around inheritance, another cleric will tell you what to do; the ideology of divide and rule appears to have returned, but it’s only returned for Muslims, and we have to out a stop to it.

2014-04-29T23:09:08+00:00