Shariah Law 101 – How Islamic Law Functions In Court Cases

Dateline, Londonistan, 2017: “If you want to be a man, that is, a Muslim, you need to bring a Qur’an and then – after you get blindfolded – pick at random a page in this holy book, then thrust your finger on the text so that your fingertip would rest on a piece of text in which there will be a message from Allah for you. Read it and understand its relation to your situation.” This is the practical description of the essential method of an Islamic (Sharia) courtroom judge’s procedure in arriving at a verdict! A child’s game of blindfolds! We shall later return to this Islamic court case. How did such a thing come to pass and dominate 1,500 million Muslims on the planet today? Don’t expect the mainstream media or Google to inform you about the basis for law in Islam. They hide the truth. Has the British government lost all sense in attempting to partner with the illegal Sharia law courts in England? 

In the history of the world, the Arab concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact, the one that we to this day still have to live with. It is essential for us to understand the nature of what we as Westerners are dealing with when it comes to the World of Islam and Islamic immigration. Because of this different and strange concept of nationality (the badge of identity for a large community of common heritage) in the greater Middle East (or “Arabia” as I will call it here) we have to understand that there the true national frontiers (invisible but real!) stand between “home” and “abroad”,  between every two creed-communities (between Arabs and Jews, between Afghans and Persians, between Turks and Christians, etc.). What the “enemy” or the “outsider” was to the Ancient Greek of Plato’s time (back then referred to as “barbarian”) the “infidel” or the “kuffar” (the unbeliever) is to the Moslem. Islam sprang from the stock of Arab speakers of ancient Mesopotamia. The debut of Islam on the world stage was Arabian in style and custom. What the Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Caesar’s time, what Christian baptism meant for early Christians, which was – guaranteed entry into the leading communal nation of a leading culture of the times – the conversion to Islam means to the deluded converts to Islam today. In the mind of Islam – national identity does not represent a unit of people by virtue of common language and origin as it does for us – but instead, it is a unity of believers arrayed vis-a-vis the unbelievers, the outsiders, the enemy.

This unity stands together as a national spirit-body, an endangered legal community, a juristic personality (described in Islamic legal practice) in a sense that is very foreign to the West. A collection of classified legal matters and commentaries on them is what the Islamic jurists call the “hadith” (defined as the collection of sayings of the prophet Muhammad used as a source of everyday instruction) which they have developed on the basis of a fixed store of divine revelations stockpiled in the Qur’an.  Islamic legal system was formed over time as a new customary law grasped in the forms of an authoritative and traditional law-material going back to the holy book. The judicial method used is casuistic – attempting to resolve moral and legal dilemmas by the application of general instructions from revelations to Muhammad with a careful distinction of special cases. The Arab-Islamic world-state (the world’s first) which from 650 AD until 1050 AD ruled a vast equatorial territory from India to France sat on the foundation of a class of law-men known as the ulemas (in Persian, “mollahs”) of the Islamic nation — who enunciated legal opinions, issued injunctions (in Arabic, “fatwa”) and condemned whole communities. If an ulema was acknowledged by an Islamic state, he was called “mufti” (for instance, the cousin of Yassir Arafat, a Nazi helper, Amin al-Hussain, held a title of mufti because he was a learned Islamic juror recognized by the Turkish state as a consultant on Islamic matters).

The opposition between statutory laws of enacted legislation and administrative laws exists in our Western, American law while it does not exists in the Arab-Islamic practice because all legislation comes from Allah. The study of the hadith (the attributed sayings of the prophet of Islam) resulted in the emergence of Islamic law (which is known as the “sunnah”). In the 800s, an Islamic jurist Muhammad al-Shafi’i sought to establish a strict definition of the sunnah. He believed that the sunnah complemented the Qur’an by illustrating the principles of the sacred text, and he wanted to use it as a basis for Islamic law. The canon of Islamic law is concentrated in the sacred texts of the Islamic faith, its canonical texts with a statutory power of legality. The hadith and the sunnah are the new Islamic law created by Islamic scholars in the form of elucidations and legal opinions on the life and teachings of Muhammad. The important Islamic jurist Al-Shafi’i created a formal, rigorous, and text-based framework for Muslim jurisprudence and legal practice. Sunni Muslims accepted this framework. Shiite Muslims believe that the legality of Islam could best be realized by the divinely guided imams influencing the Persian jurists and judges, who magically interpreted the sunnah for the believers. Here it is not enough to explain texts, and we must know what was the relationship between texts, jurisprudence, and court decisions is. It can happen that one and the same law-book is, in the waking-consciousness of two groups of Muslims, equivalent to two fundamentally different works (hence the divide between the Sunni and Shiite Islam). The key here is this: all the Islamic jurists, judges and lawyers had to have been seen as instruments or vessels of Allah or God for their work to hold any merit so that their texts can be questioned the way the Bible would be “questioned” by a Christian priest or pastor in deciding court cases. What is meant by the word “Sharia” (as in Sharia law) is the Islamic legal application of the holy trinity of Islam: the Qur’an, the hadith and the sunnah – the divine revelation, the chain of oral hearsay about the prophet of Islam and the intellectual interpolation or extrapolation of meaning from the preceding two. The ultimate authority for Sharia Law is the consensus of the majority of Muslim believers on the rightness of a belief or practice (this consensus is denoted in Arabic by the term “ijma”) established at the grand Muslim conventions. 

Whereas our Western law was made by burghers or citizens of geographic nations on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian or Muslim law was made by God’s elect of a chosen creed community who share a religious consensus. The proof of this state of affairs to a Muslim is self-evidently manifested by the intellect of chosen and enlightened men of his culture. The Western legal distinction (which is present in-between the lines of even the US Constitution) between the findings of law and the findings of fact are entirely meaningless to the Islamic jurisprudence and have no place in Muhammed’s courtroom. To the Muslims, the law, of whatever kind, spiritual or secular, came into being by the Hand of God. The authoritativeness of Islamic laws rests NOT upon their success, but – believe it or not – on the majesty of the name that they bear, on the titles they convey (which is why the official Muslim correspondence, legal or otherwise, is beset by all sorts of elaborate introductions full of exalted titles (which seems so ridiculous to us). But it matters very considerably for a man’s feelings whether he regards the binding law as an expression of some fellow man’s will (as it does in our Western legal system of juries and court opinions) or as an element of the divine dispensation (the divine ordering of the affairs of the world). In the one (our) case man sees for himself through his reasoning powers that the law is right, but in the other – he devoutly acknowledges the law (which goes to the root of the meaning of the name “Islam” = to commit, to be devoted by passive acceptance).

A Muslim in his Sharia courtroom does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is applied to him or the logical grounds for its judgments. The relation of the Islamic judge (know as the “cadi”) to the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the judge of England’s common law to the citizens of the Commonwealth who look to his common law history and strong logic for resolution. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained over time and tested in high positions (backed by a history of developments on the issue), the former upon a divine spirit that is effective and immanent in him and speaks through his mouth (which is why you find these Islamic personalities, like Bin Laden, like al-Baghdadi, like Saddam Hussein, like Ayatollah Khomeini, etc. speak with such brazen and hoary voice of authority – but ignore all historical developments of the topic at hand). But it follows from this that their respective relations to written law — the Western judge’s to his edicts, the Islamic cadi’s to his jurists’ sacred texts — must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated historical experience on a categorized court case that our judge in the Western court makes his own (adopts by agreeing with the logic of the case), but the Islamic texts used in Islamic courtrooms are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoterically questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage that he is quoting originally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words — even the letters of the legal text — and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic relations in which they must stand towards the case before him – as an alchemistry of wisdom. In a kabbalistic fashion, the conviction that the letters of the text contain secret meanings, penetrated with the living Spirit of God that can talk to the Islamic judge right there in the courtroom, finds imaginative expression in the fact that the Arabian world formed a sacred written language or a godly script of its own (the Arabic of the Qur’an, of the hadith and of the sunnah) – with which the holy writings had to be written and which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as the badge of the Islamic nation. But even in law, the basis of determining the truth by a majority of texts is the fact of the consensus of the spiritually elect, the ijma. In Islamic courtrooms, there is no such thing as the body of law based on prior logically consistent judicial decisions with their legal precedents, but only the exotic relationship between the sacred language of the authoritative text as it fingers the case at hand and the consensus of the Muslims, the ijma – all of which the Islamic judge, the cadi, is supposed to conduct through his inspired mouth in the jury-free courtroom. And should you ever have the misfortune of getting in trouble with an Islamic court as a non-Muslim – you will find out that under Sharia Law the accuser is often times the judge of the accused, too!

Whereas we seek to find the truth, each for himself, by personal pondering, the Muslim thinker feels for and ascertains the general conviction of his associates (past or present), which cannot err because the mind of God and the mind of the community are the same. If a consensus among a group of Muslims (be they judges or be they terrorists, or councilmen, etc.) is found, the truth is established – and VERDICT IS REACHED. We see examples of such councils of Muslims assembled for important decisions and verdicts to be reached, which is in Islam called “jirga” or “Loya jirga” (meaning “assembly” or “grand assembly”) and is organized for choosing a new head of state in cases of sudden death, of adoption of new constitution, or to settle national or regional issues such as war. Before the American attack on Afghanistan in late 2001, one such gathering of Afghan Muslims happened in order to decide on the US ultimatum (whether to turn over the 9/11 culprits). On a lesser technical note, various Islamic courts have settled on a limit to the number of grand Muslim jurists whose texts are allowed to be cited in court cases (usually no more than five), which serves as a canon (a decreed regulation) so that summations of authoritative Islamic court texts can be cited for effect (to buttress authority for the decision).

So, going back to our original Islamic court case example – the judge found that his finger fell on the following verse of the Qur’an: “[As for] the thief, the male, and the female, amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed as a [punishment] from Allah.” – Qur’an 5:38

This is how the judge reasoned from this text (see if you can follow this … idiotic reasoning that has been in use for centuries in all seriousness):

“Contrary to common belief, the thief’s hand shall not be cut off. Thank God for His mercy and His mathematical miracle in the Quran, we know now that the thief’s hand is to be marked. Marking the hand of the thief is stated in 5:38. The sura and verse numbers add up to 5+38 = 43. The other place in the Quran where “the hand is cut” is found in 12:31. This is where we see the women who admired Joseph so much, they “cut” their hands. Obviously, they did not sever their hands; no one can do that. The sura and verse numbers add up to 12+31=43, the same total as in 5:38. This gives mathematical confirmation that the Quranic law calls for marking the hand of the thief, not severing it.”

Good luck to the British government in its ignorant partnership with the ulemas of the Sharia Law in Britain!

Sharia courts in UK face Government inquiry over treatment of women

Home Office to examine claims sharia courts – or councils – may be working in a ‘discriminatory and unacceptable way’

The Government is to launch an investigation into whether sharia courts operating in the UK discriminate against women – legitimising forced marriages and issuing unfair divorce settlements. The Home Office said it would examine claims that sharia courts – or councils – may be working in a “discriminatory and unacceptable way”, seeking to legitimise forced marriage and issuing divorces that are unfair to women, contrary to the teachings of Islam. However, it will also seek out examples of best practice among sharia councils. The Home Office inquiry, which is part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy, will be led by Professor Mona Siddiqui, an expert in Islamic studies, and include family law barrister Sam Momtaz, retired high court judge Sir Mark Hedley and specialist family lawyer Anne Marie Hutchinson.

An estimated 30 sharia councils exist in the UK, giving Islamic divorce certificates and advice on other aspects of religious law. They have garnered fierce criticism, particularly for their treatment of women seeking religious divorces, who make up the core clientele.

Sharia is the Islamic legal system, derived from the Koran and the rulings of Islamic scholars, known as fatwas. As well as providing a code for living – including prayers, fasting and donations to the poor – sharia in some countries such as Saudi Arabia also lays down punishments as extreme as cutting off a hand or death by stoning for adultery.

Two religious and theological experts – Imam Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi and Imam Qari Asim – will advise the Government panel on detailed religious and theological issues. It is due to report next year.

Professor Siddiqui, said the review would be wide-ranging.

“It’s a privilege to be asked to chair such an important piece of work,” she said.

“At a time when there is so much focus on Muslims in the UK, this will be a wide ranging, timely and thorough review as to what actually happens in Sharia councils.”

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, said that many British people followed religious codes and practices, and benefit a great deal from the guidance they offer, but there was the potential for abuse of such systems.

“A number of women have reportedly been victims of what appear to be discriminatory decisions taken by sharia councils, and that is a significant concern,” she said.

“There is only one rule of law in our country, which provides rights and security for every citizen.

“This review will help us better understand whether, and the extent to which, sharia is being misused or exploited, and make recommendations to the Government on how to address this.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/shariah