Marotta, Anna. A Geo-Legal Approach to the English Sharia Courts: Cases and Conflicts. Comparative Law in Global Perspective 1. Leiden: Brill, 2022, 303 p., ISBN 9789004473096

Sharia courts have been a hot button issue for Muslims and the political right in Euro-America for decades. It is a topic that tests the limits of multiculturalism and women’s rights in liberal democracies. With the arrival of millions of immigrants in following World War II, countries in Europe and North America were called upon to accommodate Muslims’ legal practices. Some Muslims believe that the legal systems of their new societies have not provided them with their cultural needs to regulate their family affairs in accordance with their religious values. The calls for multicultural accommodation in family law matters have been faced with fierce opposition from the political right, making the issue a contentious topic that has been weaponized during the debate over migration, identity and liberal democratic values. Unofficial socio-legal orders originating in Islamic law exist in several European countries, but what makes Anna Marotta’s study particularly important is that she covers the UK which arguably has the highest level of systematization of sharia in family law in the West. The empirical research for this book was carried out during several stays in England and consisted of interviews with some of the main actors of the conflict, meetings with academic experts, and a spatial analysis of areas where Muslim populations reside (p. 16). Before I address the book’s main themes, a word about its structure is in order. In the first chapter, the author presents an overview of sharia to the uninitiated. She illustrates the indeterminacy of Islamic law and argues that some aspects of it are compatible with human rights while others are not (p. 4). Despite incompatibilities between Western human rights discourses and Islamic family law, many Muslims in Britain and other European jurisdictions do not take their disputes to national courts. They prefer to resolve their family disputes amicably in accordance with Islamic law (p. 5). The second chapter focuses on sharia courts and their institutionalization in England, while the third chapter analyses five court cases to explore the interactions between courts of law and the providers of Islamic justice. The fourth chapter focuses on the geopolitical conflict prompted by sharia courts. This chapter illustrates the ways in which the speech delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in February 2008 gave rise to a heated debate in English politics. In what follows, I will focus on the book’s main themes, which are as listed below: According to Marotta, her study is comparative. She compares Islamic law to the Western legal tradition which includes the common law and civil law systems. The Western legal tradition is marked by the principle of the rule of law, according to which all persons, institutions, and entities are accountable to laws which are equally enforced and independently adjudicated. These laws are deemed to be consistent with international human rights standards, while in Islamic law, human law is subordinate to divine revelation and therefore it does not treat human rights discourses as points of reference (p. 10-11). “In Islamic tradition, on the contrary, the relationship between law and religion results in the subordination of human law to the principles of the divine revelation which is recognized as sharia. Although social organisation is governed by law, religious rules formally prevail. Positive law is to come to terms with sharia, but there is a wide room for interpretation by legal scholars” (p. 11). I would argue that while the above view of Islamic law as being divine in its substantive rules has prevailed in Islamic legal historiography for centuries, some contemporary Islamic legal historians have recently argued that despite the …