There is a debate that contracting does not work well under these unique conditions - that seperation agreements should be vetted by the courts, in all cases, to avoid possible unfairness.
Seems to me that one has to either accept that argument, or reject it (and accept Sharia arbitration as valid). It makes no sense to accept private unvetted contacting for some seperations but not for others; who would act as the gate-keepers for such a system?
But in either case, the real argument is about the role of private contracting in family law. “Sharia” is just a distraction.
Actually, that article is a good example of Wikipedia not being “shite.”
John Makdisi may be entirely incorrect in his assertions, but the article is quite careful to note that those are his claims without making any effort to pretend otherwise. This allows anyone else to provide serious (not unthinking dismissive) challenges to his claims.
I do not know how much of what he has claimed has any relevance. If the dates in which certain practices were introduced to English Common Law are as he claims, then there is a amount of evidence (subject to a caution against the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy) that he has a point. If any evidence can be presented that the elements he attributes to Muslim jurisprudence can be demonstrated to have existed prior to the Norman invasion or the Crusades, then we have substantive reasons to dismiss his claims.
In either event, the source of the claims is presented and footnoted and anyone with sufficient knowledge can now examine the evidence to see whether it is correct or not. That is one thing Wikipedia does well.
And this differs from what a proper, English judge would order how, exactly? Sounds like a standard sentence from any family court in the US, except the “mentoring” would be probation.
An English judge would have the option of imprisoning, fining etc etc. What this shows is patriarchal bias - men never getting punished. I’ve seen reported cases of women having suffered serious battering and the men getting let off by these’ elders’.
It’s ridiculous to expect women and men to get justice from a tradition that treats women as second class chattels.
And yes - mentoring and probation are two different things. One has consequences for ignoring it. One lands you with a criminal record and one is essentially the guys getting together and turning a collective blind eye.
( my underline.) Could that not be off-set by the insistence of a female arbitrator, as a condition of being allowed to use their system? This would allay accusations of patriarchy, and show a willingness to cooperate with the country allowing them to practice their tradition.
Well, have to be careful here, telling a moderator his op is bollocks, but well, it’s bollocks.
Well, this is an argument for that fucking Wiki thread, but that’s fucking shite.
We already had to innocents citing this shite as if it were something mainstream, and it’s all well and bloody fine for you tech nerds to say, well any fucker can waltz in and correct whatever art.
Great. I visit any number of bloody Wiki arts including this one and I see shite.
But I ain’t paid to properly edit this shite, and frankly I am not a believe in this wiki shite, so I just look and say, well, some obsessive tosser is selling his shite. You want to pay me to correct that shite, and write it well? Well then…
Else, what I see is an incoherent muddle citing to a single author, presented with broad and excessive claims, and on its face (never mind background knowledge saying its shite) that are largely hand waving logic - post hoc ergo prompter hoc, or One Norman was in Sicily, Another in Spain…
Presentation is fucking fine if you have the fucking education to judge it, else it’s just bloody tossing like any other obsessive compulsive internet nerd.
Well, it’s hardly soemthing a Georgie should be complaining about, but women as chattel is actually English and Roman law, Islamic law never had women (free women) as chattel. Thus the whole not having their assets siezed (ahem merged) on marriage, etc.
You’re just going on and on out of blind fear of foreigners, BN style. Worthy of the comments made when the poor Jews first got their rights in Britain almost 200 odd years ago. Same kind of fear mongering.
As others have said “Under the act, the sharia courts are classified as arbitration tribunals. The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.”
Having watched ‘Judge Judy’ and similar US TV programs, I could start a thread entitled:
US adopts trial by TV with lawyers forbidden, no right of appeal and a crazed woman screaming at defendants!
The British Government is doing none of those things. We have an independent judiciary.
As for our state religion, it has no effect on the law. I’m an atheist and have no problem in my job or personal life.
It’s just a tradition, like the Monarchy. The Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury have no legal effect on us.
I gotta say, “not treating women like chattel” is one of the things that differentiated Islam from the local religions at the time of it’s founding. It was revolutionary in that it recognized property right, inheritance, and (limited) rights in cases of divorce for women. Of course nowadays “women can earn property” is not quite so revolutionary and Islam is generally behind when it comes to women’s right. But it is important to point out that Islam is not a complete loss when it comes to women.
I’ve actually lived in an area where Islam did represent a step up in women’s rights, and people following traditional religions did indeed buy and sell women exactly like they bought and sold cattle. It really is a very different thing.
Familiar with the cases in question, are you? Sure that they’d have merited criminal proceedings, are you? Know anything about them, in fact? No, thought not. Never mind, though.
I’m with tomndebb re: the wiki article, incidentally. I don’t see why it’s remotely preposterous to suggest that there was a cross-pollination of ideas between two cultures which were in quite close contact, and I think that while the article is badly-written in places, it’s pretty clear about where its claims are sourced from. Why is it such a silly idea that some of our common law draws ideas from Arabic jurisprudence? After all, we nicked their mathematics (and thank heaven; we’d be buggered if we were still using Roman numerals).
Saying “Sharia was a major influence on English common law” is still pretty misleading due to current simplistic perceptions of Sharia (hand chopping and wife beating for everyone!), but it’s not an inherently stupid proposition.
The problem is that the whole period when common law developed coincided with the Dark Ages. So we don’t have much documentation to show how the law was actually practiced. We have to kind of infer it from other evidence.
The country was a patchwork of local laws. Eventually some of these laws coalesced and became accepted as laws over bigger and bigger areas. The laws held true regardless of which king happened to be in power at that time. The kings didn’t get very involved in changing the long-held local laws. Dark Age kings were more interested in expanding (or defending) their kingdom - and gathering skulls.
I’m a bit sceptical about the islamic influence. It’s true that common law was codified after the norman conquest but it was in existence for about a thousand years before that. It was in existence when the romans were around (probably). There was undoubtedly a norman influence when they came, as there was a christian influence not long after, but common law predates them both.
The problem is that this all happened during the Dark Ages which are so named precisely because we have so little information about them.
One of the problems with the attempt to do this in Ontario (referenced above) was that the arbitration decisions were to be legally binding decisions which replaced court decisions, removing the right to turn to the courts if one party did not feel that they were fairly treated, and putting the legal system in the potential position of enforcing religious law over provincial law. Ontario reverted to a system of voluntary arbitration - you could still take your case to an arbitration board, but the decision is not legally enforceable and can be escalated to the courts if desired.
I agree with this system - parties in most civil disputes should be able to make use of any mutually agreeable method of resolving their dispute short of legal action (as has always been the case), but they must always be able to turn to the courts as a last resort (and the courts should be able to take any previous arbitration decisions into account when determining the fair resolution of the case). I have no problem with the legal system encouraging formal or informal arbitration as a first resort, and even providing some support to the process. I disagree with any attempt to replace the courts with a legally binding arbitration process which does not have the same safeguards and principles.
So, because you are insufficiently informed and, apparently, lack the motivation, to actually provide a serious correction to an article that clearly indicates the sources and backgrounds of the conclusions reached by one individual, you are going to dismiss all of Wikipedia?
The once was a fox who discovered a bunch of grapes hanging just out of reach of his best jump. . . .
Yes, but also, it’s not like historians have never altered the past to suit or support the period they were writing in. How many Christian historians would be keen to credit Islam with having had such influence, if it was true?
Christian historians have published the contributions that Islamic society provided to European society in the areas of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, weaponry, and economics (among others) for several hundred years. Why they would try to hide similar contributions in the area of law would be quite puzzling. (Again, this does not make Makdisi’s claims true. However, the way to debunk Makdisi is to provide documentary evidence that contradicts his claims.)
So, you don’t feel there is any element of negationism here then? Historical negationism - Wikipedia Or if there is, it is being done by the wiki writer, and not the mainstream historians?
Ridiculous nonsense. when you’ve had to scuttle through a major city with a Muslim girl on the run from her abusive family with the knowledge that if you’re seen by a relative they will try and kill you you’ll remove your pc blinders and recognise the basic fact that sharia is not based on any analog of our values.
In the UK it is rooted in the values of rural bangladesh and pakistan and is part of a legal tradition in which women and men have unequal rights and status. This is the real world and not a game of Fantasy Islam where we get to screw our eyes up and cherry pick phrases in an attempt to pretend it is or could be a liberal ideology.
It is the Islam where women are legally unequal - half the inheritance. The islam where the divorce rules for genders are different. The Islam where men are not punished for wife-beating. And the Islam where honour killings are rife and concealed by the ‘community’. No bloody way should we concede a legal inch to sharia.
And no - don’t offer me the specious tribe/islam distinction here. Honour killing is self-defined as an Islamic practice in some communities, regardless of what the theology says. Religions are what religions do.
The sole contribution to astronomy in the Islamic ‘golden age’ was a whole bunch of labels for a whole bunch of stars such as (to give a minor example) Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak (the three stars of Orion’s belt).
Meaningful contributions of Islamic astronomy are no better than the contributions made by the rest of the world of ancient times and amount to nothing significant or useful as far as advancing astronomy is concerned.
So, someone who (presumably) finds the muddled mess of the Koran easy to comprehend cannot understand Aristotle after forty readings?
Sorry. This is the kind of bilge that’s probably eagerly lapped up by Arts/Humanities lame brains across the western world who attend Saudi funded ‘Islamic Studies’ courses run by the likes of Esposito or Armstrong, and I ain’t buying.
Contributions to economics (in the modern sense of the word) until the late 20th Century (e.g. Sharia compliant finance) are nonexistent, if historical commentators of previous centuries, including astute observers such as Mark Twain, who commented on results and consequences not economic treatises, are anything to go by.
Law?
There is no specifically ‘Islamic’ contribution to ‘western’ law that is worthy of being called ‘law’.
Well, it would hardly be negationism, at any event, because there is nothing in Makdisi’s claims that attempts to undercut existing understanding. He is merely trying to provide additional information. Had he speculated that European traditions of justice simply did not exist prior to being influenced by Islamic justice, you might have a point. Noting that specific aspects of the judicial system or Common Law may have been borrowed or influenced by contact with Law as practiced in Islamic society does not undermine any existing knowledge.
And even if Makdisi is completely wrong, that is not a failing of Wikipedia, (the initial point I made), because his quoted comments are open to correction from anyone else who can provide a contrary citation.
YEt you feel comfortable cherry picking specifdic events tied to specific cultures and imposing them on Islam, both current and historic.
Your comment about rural Bangladesh and Pakistan is very correct. Your first example is exactly the sort of thing that could have happened (and still might in some areas) to a mixed couple in Christian Serbia or Croatia or Sicily or even to a Catholic/Protestant couple in Northern Ireland not too many years back. It had nothing to do with Sharia, and everything to do with closed societies who feel threatened.
I am not arguing for the adoption of Sharia in family arbitration, simply noting that blaming cultural situations on “Sharia” (while failing to acknowledge that there are several variant forms of Sharia and many separate applications of those forms, based on culture), is counterproductive.
For example
is exactly true (although, as I understand it, under Roman Law women ahd certain rights that later disappeared for a time). The actual commands set forth in the Qur’an and later expounded upon by the earliest Muslim legal authorities did not permit women to be treated as chattel and did allow women to exist as independent persons. That those laws have been corrupted by later cultural traditionsis no more the fault of “Sharia” thanChristians using the Bible to support slavery or impose anti-miscegenation laws.
