Sharia for feminists

Is Islam inherently misogynistic? That old charge arose again after the Manchester bombing in May, with the suggestion that Salman Abedi’s choice of target was driven by a deep-seated prejudice against women — above all against young western women, with their supposedly lax morals and corrupting ways.

It was a subtext, too, of the timing of the London Bridge attack, 10 p.m. on a warm summer night, when the killers must have known the area would be thronged with young couples out enjoying themselves. Three of the dead were women under the age of 30. The media ‘face’ of the atrocity was Sara Zelenak, a strikingly beautiful 21-year-old from Brisbane.

I spent last year travelling through Muslim Britain, partly in an attempt to address this niggling question of inherent misogyny. My findings surprised me. Take, for instance, the practice of sharia here, the system so widely viewed as inimical to the rights of women. In Oldham, 15 minutes up the road from Manchester Arena, I sat in on a session of the Wuzara Ulama sharia council, whose sole function turned out to be to grant divorces to women trapped in bad marriages, often over the heads of abusive husbands who didn’t want to separate. These women had no other escape route. Maulana Ejaz, the cleric from Dewsbury who heads the Council, estimates that in northern England where he operates, some 60 per cent of Muslim marriages are not registered under English civil law — which of course renders the English legal system powerless to offer would-be divorcees any redress at all.

None of Ejaz’s customers felt repressed by sharia. On the contrary, he was able to produce a dozen feedback forms from past clients, all of them women escaping abusive marriages, and all of them expressing gratitude for the councillors’ help and describing as ‘excellent’ the service they had received.