Angrezi shariat: Islamic law in 20th- and 21st- century Britain and its colonial antecedents

Abstract

An increasingly formalized parallel Islamic legal system has emerged in England over the past few decades, brought about by the migration of mainly South Asian Muslims to the country. Especially in matters of personal law, many of Britain’s Muslims prefer the arbitration of community courts governed according to the Islamic legal tradition, rather than official common law. In response, the English judiciary has been recently integrating these community sharia courts into its own system to gain some influence over this parallel legal structure. The cooperation and co-optation of an Islamic legal system by common law today bears a notable similarity to a similar development in British-ruled India, where Islamic law was preserved by colonial authorities for Muslim subjects yet molded by the requirements of the common law system and integrated within it.