Should Sharia law councils be regulated?

0:04Hi, I'm Julie Banks and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. Coming up in this episode, award-winning journalist David James Smith joins us to share the story behind his special report into London's Sharia Law Councils. One of the key concerns about the councils is that the clients are in the main women seeking divorce and the officials who oversee them are in the main men.

0:42Although Sharia law councils, often referred to as courts, have no legal jurisdiction within the UK, many people of Muslim faith turn to them for guidance on aspects of their everyday lives. David has been investigating how the Sharia law councils in London operate and exploring how well they serve those who turn to them for help. David, how much did you know about Sharia Law Councils ahead of writing this story? And what were your initial discoveries? It's a subject that I knew very little about, was keen to find out and, you know, to come at it with an open mind. And it's a subject that obviously aroused quite intense feelings on different sides.

1:23So I was trying to get to the bottom of things. I went to see a woman at the Islamic Sharia Council in Leighton in East London. and her father had founded that organization four decades ago. She herself was an Islamic scholar. Her name was Hula Hassan. And on her shelf, she had all these Arabic texts, voluminous numbers of books all about Sharia law. So it covers a wide range of aspects of people's lives. And obviously, in Islamic countries, the law is embedded in the laws of the state. But in the UK, the laws of the state are separate to well see so sharia law in the uk doesn't have any part to play in our own legal system so nothing about sharia law in the uk is in any way binding or has any power over our ordinary laws in terms of that though how do they how does the work of the councils fit in with their local community again i you know i went on a voyage with discovery so interesting to me they didn't exist and then there was this big influx of people migrants coming from different islamic communities around the world really particularly from the indian you know subcontinent from south asia and issues arose to do with their faith that there wasn't really already answered to and so the councils really came into being to uh to answer a need in their communities.

2:52And the one that I went to visit was in fact the first one in the UK. It was founded in 1982 by, as I say, Hoda Hassan's father. And over time, and probably at that time, but later, they became associated with issues around Islamic marriages. So people were getting married in ceremonies in their faith, and then issues were rising, the marriages were breaking down. And because the marriages weren't recognized in our own laws, they weren't properly registered, there was no mechanism for having a divorce. So the councils grew up as a way of resolving the issue. So they became, you know, effectively like family law courts, but not courts for Islamic people trying to, you know, get out of their Islamic marriages.

3:45It sounds like it can be quite a complicated and complex situation for people then that are in the process of maybe trying to divorce if they've not been legally married here in the UK. What sort of experiences have you been hearing about when writing this piece, particularly about the women that are using the services of the councils? Yes. So I was very lucky. I came across a new study just published earlier this year, 2025, by a chap who was himself an imam over in East London. His name was Islam Uddin. And he'd written a PhD, taken him four years to research about Muslim women and Islamic family law.

4:27He called it Muslim women and Islamic family law lived experiences in Britain. And he had sat in on divorce hearings. He had talked to women who'd been through the process and or were going through the process. And so his book was this really vivid account of what happens. And, you know, I was very lucky to come across it. So that together with my meeting with Ms. Hassan at the Islamic Sharia Council, I felt I really got to grips with what was going on. So one of the issues in Islamic marriages known as Nika, Nika marriages, N-I-K-A-H. And sometimes the people have also had a civil ceremony and the marriages are properly registered.

5:09They're legal marriages in the eyes of our law. And sometimes they haven't. and men have a different way of ending their marriage to women. So men apparently can end Islamic marriages by simply saying to the woman on a number of occasions that they divorce them. And that apparently is sufficient in the eyes of Islam to denote divorce. Well, that's what many people's understanding is. But women, if they want to get a divorce, they can't just tell the man they want to divorce, they then got to go and seek a divorce from the council or the council. If the husband won't agree to the divorce, the council can issue a kind of certificate of, you know, finding that they agree the couple should be divorced.

5:53And then often there are issues, there are financial issues. So the council's decisions aren't binding in any way, but there are issues around it's called maha it's a dower which is a payment that the husband makes to the wife when they marry and there's quite often issues about whether that will be repaid and if so how much and has the husband paid it or should he still have the obligation to pay it even though they're getting divorced and the judges who sit in these hearings will also help to make those decisions, but they're not binding in our own law. So when you were speaking to Ms. Hazan about the work of the council, I mean, how do the council sort of tend to view how they can work within the UK legal system?

6:40Is there any thoughts on how the two worlds kind of collide in that sense? Well, they definitely have collided quite dramatically. So there's a far right group in this country called Britain First, and on three separate occasions, they've invaded the Islamic Sharia Council where Mr. Sam works and tried to disrupt it and been abusive and shouted and recorded video and posted it and they make derogatory remarks about the Islamic faith and the fact that they're taking liberties with the English law as these far-right Britain first people see it. Of course they were taking liberties with the law themselves because they were illegally invading somebody else's space and I think that people you know non-Muslim people tend to have a very pejorative view of Sharia law.

7:25It's a kind of sensationalized concept, and they imagine that people are being sentenced to be stoned or beheaded or have their hands chopped off, which is some of the kind of horror stories we hear about from quite draconian Islamic countries. But nothing of that sort, obviously, takes place in this country. It's really, as far as I could see, quite a benign process. But there is the risk that women will, I suppose, lose out in some way. So, you know, we know that men from all backgrounds, all ethnicities can exploit women in marriages, outside of marriages, take advantage of them, be violent towards them.

8:03And so Islamuddin's study that I referred to earlier, he had spoken with 27 British Bangladeshi women who were seeking divorce, and quite a large number of those have been the victims of their husband's domestic violence. And for them, going to the Sharia council to seek a divorce was a positive experience. So it was a way of releasing them from their Islamic marriage. So obviously, for many people in this country, they like to get married in a church, Christian people, that's very important to them. They're lucky that the church weddings are considered to be legal and binding but if you're a Muslim there's no legal binding on your marriage so you have to rely on the council to get you out of it and that's what they were doing and in the main Islamuddin's research suggested that the women were happy with the way that the council had operated on their behalf sometimes they were the council recluse of being too slow sometimes they're accused of you know trying to hold up a system that favors men because it's so much easier for men to get out of marriage in Islam than it is for women.

9:12Sometimes where the marriages aren't legally registered in this country, they allow men to exploit women and the women find difficult to get out of them. Then there are lots of issues around family honor, that coming to play where the women may go to their own families and say, look, I'm being mistreated by my husband. And the family say, well, as a matter of honor, we can't have that. you've got to stay in the marriage and we're not going to support you. Let's go to a break. Coming up, is there an argument for Sharia law councils to be regulated? David James Smith stays with us to share more from his investigative report.

9:51We'll see you back here in just a moment.

10:00welcome back in a special report for the standard david james smith has been investigating sharia law councils and their role in london's muslim communities david what are some of the challenges presented when the councils are involved in ending muslim marriages they're very difficult very sensitive issues and one of the problems with the councils is of course that they're unregulated. There had been a review of them in about 2017, instigated by the government at the time, run by a prominent Islamic scholar, a woman called Mona Siddiqui, who often appears, I think, on television, on the radio, talking about various issues.

10:39And she had addressed concerns that the councils weren't regulated. And she recommended that they be regulated, but the government didn't want to regulate Sharia councils because, you know, it would have given them a kind of standing that they shouldn't have because they're not part of our legal system. And in fact, Ms. Fassan, who I met and talked to, she's also in favour of regulation. She doesn't want the government to regulate councils, but she wants some kind of, you know, self-regulation, a process of self-regulation, perhaps a body set up by the councils that can set standards because she talked to me about her concerns over the mushrooming of these kind of backroom sharia councils where people were perhaps exploiting women, maybe taking advantage of them, charging them fees that were exorbitant to help them achieve their divorce.

11:27And she was quite funny in a way. She was very unimpressed with these bodies and spoke very negatively about them. She identified one that I won't name, but yeah, she was very rude about it. So she clearly felt strongly about it. And I thought that was interesting. And so her account of the Islamic Sharia Council in Leighton is registered with the Charities Commission. And she said to me very pointedly, I don't expect you'll find many of these other bodies are registered with the Charity Commission. So she was suggesting that her organisation set the standard. Firstly, it's reassuring to hear that there have been positive experiences from the women that you mentioned, but that imbalance in terms of what various councils around the country may or may provide or the sort of outlook each one of them might have.

12:14I mean, that's problematic for anyone, isn't it, who needs to make use of their services, because if they're not necessarily being treated the same, depending on the area they live in or the council that they go to, that's going to cause a lot of problems for them. Absolutely. And there was a suggestion that some people could go council shopping in the sense that you might get a decision from one council that it wasn't the decision you wanted, and you could go to another one to get a different decision. I don't I know people do that particularly. One of the key concerns about the councils is that the clients are in the main women seeking divorce and the officials who oversee them are in the main men.

12:53So Mr. Sam was one of just two so-called judges in this country who sit in the hearings to determine divorces and the Sharia councils. And in fact, Mr. Sam, she didn't like herself being referred to as a judge because she didn't like to create an impression that there was a trial and that somebody was being judged. She preferred to describe herself as an Islamic scholar who was bringing her scholarship, I suppose, to bear in these knotty issues that couples were bringing to her. And she didn't call them hearings. She called them meetings where they would all sit and try to find the solution. So it was kind of an interesting interpretation.

13:32And you would think that, But, you know, the advice would be always that women who are having an Islamic marriage and nikah marriage should also marry, you know, in the eyes of the state so that they're legally protected. But Ms. Hassan also suggested that in some cases that people are preferring just to have an Islamic marriage because, you know, it's important to them because it's part of their faith. And also it means that if they need to end the marriage, it's easier and quicker to do that with the council than it is to end a legally binding marriage with divorce. Now, how true that is, that was an interesting perspective and one I hadn't really thought about until she raised it.

14:10Yeah, it's very interesting. By and large, then once councils have given their advice or made their decisions on these cases, do the community generally accept the decisions that have been made? Well, that appears to be the case. Again, it was quite interesting that there are so few statistics available because the numbers of Islamic marriages that are conducted isn't recorded. So we don't really know how many of these so-called unregistered marriages, unregistered in the eyes of our own England and Wales law, actually exist. In Islamidine study, there were 27 women and a majority of them had also had a civil marriage.

14:53So they had that protection and they would have to go through that process. And obviously also, if you have issues around childcare and maintenance, those issues also have to be resolved in the England and Wales family courts. So just sort of to sum up about it, really, I mean, you know, as we sort of alluded to earlier, a lot of the time stories that we hear about in the news to do with Sharia law are often sort of part of a more distressing story about violence against women or, you know, when people seem to have taken the law seemingly into their own hands. From what you're saying, there seems to be plenty of positivity as well coming from these councils.

15:32How do you think we demystify the work that they're doing so that it's better understood within society and maybe possibly more widely accepted as a process? Well, I mean, it's like so many aspects of a multicultural society, a multicultural city like London, a place that I consider to be extremely exciting, not least because of all the varieties of things that go on here and you have to expose it to the light and look at it in a calm and collected way and you know you as a journalist I often try to see things from the point of view of the person who I'm going to represent or talk about so you know set my own prejudices to one side and not be taken in by things but to look at things in a a balanced way.

16:18So not to barge in like Britain first and make accusations and allegations, but to sit down and talk and listen. And I mean, of course, within Islam, there are women who, you know, get into terribly difficult situations by men who, you know, very cruelly exploit them. But of course, that's not peculiar to Islam. And, you know, we have too many cases here of men within and without marriages who, you know, are very violent and sometimes fatally violent towards their partners. So it's not something unique to Islam. And what I think is perhaps concerning is that women don't always have the protection of our own law because they haven't had the civil registration that gives them those legal protections.

17:01But of course, any woman can, you know, seek help, whether they're married or not, in the eyes of the English law. If they've got difficulties, there are always people, you know, placed to turn to. And I guess Sharia councils are one of those places. And that's The Standard. To read David's full report and all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. And please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. This podcast will be back on Tuesday. So until then, do have a wonderful long weekend.

17:43Thank you.