Apparently, there's been a sharia court sitting for several months at the Hijaz College Islamic University in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. It's said to be the UK's first Islamic sharia court.
This tribunal – which calls itself the Muslim Arbitration Council – "operates alongside the British legal system" and has "binding legal status". There may be things wrong with the British legal system (as there are with any legal system), but it's what our legislators have put in place for Britain, and we, using an admittedly flawed electoral system, have put those legislators in place, using the limited democracy successive governments allow us to have.
Further legal arrangements should be decided by our elected representatives, not a bunch of deluded, Allah-soaked superstitionists who think their imported, religiously inspired legal system should sit in addition to, and have "binding legal status" alongside, the one that is legally in place in the country they've chosen to live in.
But this is more evidence of the sinister creeping Islamisation that the great and the good in the UK are allowing to slither over and around us. They won't be happy till it's too late to stop it, and, as if from a Kafkaesque nightmare, they'll wake up one morning to find they're ruled by Islamist politicians and adjudicated over by an Islamist judiciary.
Recently, Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, said there was no reason why sharia law could not be used for contractual agreements and marital disputes. Well, there's no reason, presumably, my lord, why any two parties shouldn't thrash out an agreement over just about anything, provided that decision didn't then obviate the need for the law to step in (if it were a situation that would normally involve it).
I mean, if you and I agree that you won't park your ugly, gas-guzzling people carrier outside my house, but it took a couple of neighbours to help us decide on that agreement, there's no harm in that. So was there any need for such a pronouncement? Is it not just a form of arbitration, of which there are many in the UK?
Ah, but this is sharia? So where does sharia differ from British law? What is wrong with arbitration panels and County Courts already in existence under civil law? Perhaps the clue is here, where the paper says:
But in some Muslim countries punishments handed out under the legal system have included beheadings, public floggings and thieves’ hands being chopped off.
Faisal Aqtab Siddiqi, a commercial law barrister and head of Hijaz College, who has sat in judgment at a number of the tribunals, said British society was not ready for such punishments.
But he added that if society became more "civilised" then those who broke the law should expect to receive the highest degree of punishment [my emphasis].
Is that what he would prefer, then? That Britain should become "civilised" and start to separate people from their limbs?
If the paper has reported him faithfully (and it is a trashy tabloid, don't forget, but presumably it knows its representation of him can be challenged), then this man is a dangerous and deranged idiot, and ought to be prosecuted for inciting violence. For that's what his sentiments look like.
If he's telling fellow Muslims (and he is a "scholar", let us not forget, and will command respect) that it would be "civilised" to use "the highest degree of punishment", and he feels that those punishments should include decapitation, amputations and floggings, there's something seriously wrong with a country that allows the head of one of its educational institutions (albeit one many of whose teachings are based on uncivilised seventh-century thinking) to hold such views and express them publicly with his official hat on.
And this is someone who is part of the ideology that is pushing for an end to criticism of the Muslim "faith" within the UN. He and his cranky kind, his fellow sharia-ists, can call, it seems, for people to be flogged and have their heads amputated, but they don't want us to criticise their disturbing, wacky, menacing, sinister worldview.
Perhaps it's the college that ought to lose its head.
