UK sharia chief – there is no such thing as rape within marriage

And, there goes a thousand years worth of human rights advancement in one fell swoop.

From The Samosa:

Wednesday, 06 October 2010 15:13
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Chaminda Jayanetti speaks to the president of Britain’s main Islamic law court about rape within marriage.

It is hardly the most obviously controversial of statements:

The husband undertake not to abuse his wife/child(ren) verbally, emotionally, physically, or sexually.

This statement is from the London-based Muslim Institute’s Muslim Marriage Contract, published in 2008 as an attempt to modernise the contract governing many Islamic marriages in Britain. But few within the British Muslim establishment were impressed. Britain’s main Islamic sharia court, the Islamic Sharia Council, produced a swift rebuttal of the contract, including the statement on sexual abuse (page 6 here).

Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed is the president of the Islamic Sharia Council. A softly spoken elderly man with the manner of a kindly grandfather, he is far removed from a firebrand radical Islamic preacher – indeed, he is nothing of the sort.

But sitting in a small office at the al-Tawhid Mosque in East London, where the Council’s sessions had been relocated while its nearby headquarters were renovated (the Council has now moved back), I asked Sheikh Sayeed whether he considered non-consensual marital sex to be rape.

“No,” he replied. “Clearly there cannot be any ‘rape’ within the marriage. Maybe ‘aggression’, maybe ‘indecent activity’.”

He said it was “not Islamic” to classify non-consensual marital sex as rape and prosecute offenders, adding that “to make it exactly as the Western culture demands is as if we are compromising Islamic religion with secular non-Islamic values.”

The Islamic Sharia Council handles very few cases of alleged marital rape – Sheikh Sayeed said there had only been two or three such cases since the Council was founded in 1982. It is therefore unlikely that the Council’s views on this issue, or those of Sheikh Sayeed himself, directly impact upon a significant number of marital rape victims.

Sheikh Sayeed made his opposition to non-consensual marital sex absolutely clear – “of course it is bad, one should not jump on his wife as and when he desires” – but he said that it was wrong to prosecute it as rape:

“It is not an aggression, it is not an assault, it is not some kind of jumping on somebody’s individual right. Because when they got married, the understanding was that sexual intercourse was part of the marriage, so there cannot be anything against sex in marriage. Of course, if it happened without her desire, that is no good, that is not desirable. But that man can be disciplined and can be reprimanded.”

Rather than pursuing miscreants through the criminal justice system, Sheikh Sayeed felt the sharia court was better placed to handle such cases by policing offenders by “Islamic means”. He explained the Council’s approach:

“If such a man comes to us, to ask him not to repeat the same, ask forgiveness from his wife, ask forgiveness from Allah as well, and make a new contract that he would never do it, otherwise his wife will have the liberty to finish the marriage unilaterally. This sort of relief is available.”

By contrast, he said the prosecution of marital rape was due to misguided Western values: “Why it is happening in this society is because they have got this idea of so-called equality, equal rights. And they are misusing these equal rights in every single aspect of human conduct. That’s why. It is one aggression against another, and that is bigger aggression against minor one.

I asked Sheikh Sayeed what he considered to be the “bigger aggression”.

“To call it rape. Rape is a criminal offence in this country; man will end up in prison for three, five years or more.”

So the non-consensual sex is the minor aggression, and calling it rape is the major aggression?

“Yes”

Why is calling it rape a major aggression?

“Because within the marriage contract it is inherent there that man will have sexual intercourse with his wife. Of course, if he does something against her wish or in a bad time etc, then he is not fulfilling the etiquettes, not that he is breaching any code of sharia – he is not coming to that point. He may be disciplined, and he may be made to ask forgiveness. That should be enough.”

Sheikh Sayeed said he would not immediately advise a wife who claimed her husband had raped her to go to the police. “Not in the beginning, unless we establish that it really happened. Because in most of the cases, wives, as they have been advised by their solicitors that one of the four reasons for which a wife can get a divorce is rape, so they are encouraged to say things like this that may not be the true picture of the situation.”

I asked if this meant he felt some women were falsely alleging rape.

“Yes, yes, in the most cases. A lady who came to us with this sort of idea, after some time, after a few months, she said it was only to expedite the procedure of divorce.

On this occasion, the Council had already granted the wife a divorce. “We were talking to both sides – one side is in denial, and the wife has been insisting. But later she has given up her claim and then admitted that it was only to expedite the procedure of divorce.”

While this specific case may have been a false allegation, it is not at all representative of alleged rape cases nationally. Research indicates that only eight percent of rape cases reported to the police are classified as false allegations (page 63 of this PDF file).

While nearly 60 percent of rape cases that reach court end in a conviction, a huge proportion of alleged rape incidents never reach court due to problems securing evidence or victims being unwilling to endure the added emotional trauma of a court case. As a result, only around six percent of rape incidents reported to the police end in a conviction, while the previous government estimated that 75-95 percent of all rapes were never even reported to the police at all.

“If nothing helps,” said Sheikh Sayeed, “at the end she may call the police if it is genuine, and unless she can prove from DNA and other tests, she cannot succeed there.” On that point, the statistics bear him out.

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Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed came to Britain from Bangladesh in 1977, five years before the Islamic Sharia Council was established. He says there are now 16 main sharia courts around Britain, including in Birmingham, Bradford, and Ealing in West London, as well as a number of more informal tribunals – a report published last year by the right-wing think tank Civitas claimed up to 85 tribunals currently exist in this country.

Most of the Islamic Sharia Council’s casework centres on marriage and divorce, and like virtually all British sharia courts, it plays no role in criminal law proceedings – and Sheikh Sayeed was clear that he did not want it to.

The largest sharia courts, including the Islamic Sharia Council, are operated by the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, whose civil law rulings can be enforced through the mainstream courts under the 1996 Arbitration Act.

“No other sharia council can claim they are so diverse as ours,” says Sheikh Sayeed with pride, “because other sharia councils, they are following one school of fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence]. Ours is diverse – we are hanafi, shafi’i, hanbali.”

He adds that other sharia councils are monolinguistic. “Ours, we have Bangladeshi, we have Pakistani, we have Indian, we have Palestinian, we have Somali scholars on our board.”

Sharia courts in Britain have a reputation as secretive, with hearings conducted in private – although given that the vast majority of cases heard by sharia courts concern marriage and divorce, this is comparable to the lack of openness that pervaded the mainstream family court system until quite recently.

In any case, away from the hearings themselves, the Islamic Sharia Council is quite open in its dealings. Sheikh Sayeed is often interviewed by journalists, and meetings of the Islamic Sharia Council’s board of scholars – which oversees the management of the court – are open to non-Muslims.

“We always have some non-Muslims there,” says Sheikh Sayeed. “Almost every monthly meeting we have some journalists, someone who is not a Muslim.” He notes wryly that most of these non-Muslim observers are journalists, although academic researchers have attended from as far afield as Washington University.

Some of the leading UK sharia law bodies are increasingly looking to engage in issues affecting sections of the British Muslim population. The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal has recognised that forced marriages are a problem, and has published policy recommendations it believes could help confront the practice by tackling it through the sharia court system.

Within the constraints of Islamic jurisprudence, sharia tribunals often work to protect women who have been abandoned or physically harmed by their husbands, or those whose husbands are engaging in polygamy. The Islamic Sharia Council – and Britain’s other main sharia courts – are not the dens of misogyny that the rhetoric that often describes them would suggest.

However, some feel that aspects of sharia law in the UK are out of place in modern British society. The Muslim Institute is run by Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, a former religious conservative who has become a liberal in recent years and is now a trustee of British Muslims for Secular Democracy.

As well as the passage on domestic abuse, the Muslim Institute’s Muslim Marriage Contract granted wives an absolute right of divorce, removed the higher status traditionally given to males over females as witnesses to marriage, established that both husband and wife should work collectively towards the family’s economic stability, and outlawed polygamy. The Islamic Sharia Council rebutted each of these points, often on the grounds that they traded in Islamic scripture for Western values.

The Muslim Institute has little influence over Britain’s network of sharia courts, but hopes its marriage contract will catch on through individual Muslims downloading the contract from its website – thereby sidestepping the opposition of the British sharia establishment.

Interestingly, Mufti Barakatullah of the Islamic Sharia Council helped draw up the Muslim Marriage Contract – convincing the Muslim Council of Britain to back the initiative. There was only one problem – Mufti Barakatullah had not consulted with his colleagues on the board of the Islamic Sharia Council. The MCB promptly withdrew its backing.

I asked Sheikh Sayeed whether Mufti Barakatullah was still involved with the Islamic Sharia Council. He laughed. “He is nominally still – we always invite him to the board meetings, but for the last few meetings he did not show us his face. Maybe for this, maybe for genuine reasons.”

He said that the scholars of the Islamic Sharia Council did take account of the values of modern-day Britain when formulating its principles, but with one caveat:

“Without touching the original sources of Islam. We don’t deviate from Quran, deviate from sunnah.”

The Samosa interviewed Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed in March 2010

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

6 Replies to “UK sharia chief – there is no such thing as rape within marriage”

  1. Welcome to the past, under sharia there is a lot of legalized rape, I wish the people who believe in the moderate Moslem would read what was said.

  2. We civilized folk in the advanced Western nations and culture do not need a 7th century bum in a dirty nightshirt to dictate our laws and norms of our society.

  3. my islamophobic illness is so severe that when I read these things that are now common in democratic countries I throw up

    When I see a covered head in this country, I cry over all the years, decades of struggle to achieve gender equality and reforms in the Christian churches so that all can live free……….they can too, the covered heads, but the problem is their agenda is not freedom, democracy, rule of law.. It is Islam..period….which superceds all these tenants of free societies.

  4. Human rights? What about the human rights of MEN? We are now in a milieu in Western societies where the pendulum has swung so far towards the other gender that men are now the abused. Abused in so many ways.

    It is time for a change.

  5. EM In fact I agree with you. This in no way mitigates the horror that is sharia however. I have spent years fighting the systemic injustices that have been perpetrated on men in Western societies and fought many battles and I’m pleased to say on some fronts, the pendulum swings back toward the middle. On divorce and child support for example, Canada has become much more rational this past decade.

    This is a great thing. However while you are correct and some laws remain obscenely biased against men, I could name several, it is not comparable to laws that would kill a woman because she was raped and therefore, had committed adultery under the tenants of Islam’s sharia.