Sharia Councils, Religious Islamic Identity Politics, Female Inequality, Honour-based Abuse, Clan-based Cultural Enclaves and Two-Tier Justice.
The time has come now for British authorities to wake up to the real-world implications of deferring to cultural norms and practices which devalue women’s personal legal status and lead to systemic criminal abuses of women and girls from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds.
Islamic law has entrenched sexual inequality in Britain. Its legal principles have spawned clan systems in Britain, which enforce forms of male entitlement and privilege. Many practices in Muslim immigrant clan cultures implement strict dress codes for women and girls; arranged and cousin marriage, forced marriage, child marriages, and polygamy. Cultural honour-based codes are followed within Muslim clan groups, betraying a very high tolerance for various forms of domestic coercion, as well as physical and sexual abuse within the family. Sex-selective abortions will be viable options for women from cultures that push ‘son preference’.
Such cultural practices may be discreetly encouraged by advocates for Muslim communities, in the name of strengthening social cohesion and preventing the alienation of cultural minorities. But the reality is that to reassure fragile and insecure ethno-Islamic religious identities, domestic law must promise to tacitly accept the starkest forms of sex discrimination. In the long term, this will undermine social cohesion, since any weakening of domestic law by separatist groups threatens the legal sovereignty of the United Kingdom as a whole.