The appeals court in England has declared that a nikkah with hundreds of witnesses cannot be considered a marriage; therefore in the case of divorce, the spouses have no rights and no legal protection.
This is the failure of the secular state, which cannot accommodate people of different values and faiths. On the one hand, it promotes promiscuity as a modern liberal right, while denying separating couples, who have not formally registered their marriage with the state, any legal rights.
Islam is a just system revealed by the creator of mankind Allah. Islam made the formal contract of marriage the basis upon which the rights of divorcing couples depend, with two witnesses sufficient to establish that the contract does indeed exist. Secular British law rejects these witnesses to deny the spouses their rights on a technicality.
The whole world can accept a witness on a contract, and even their own courts do in business transactions, but when it comes to Islamic marriages the same standard is not applied.
This is not a surprise for any Muslim experienced with life in Britain. We have become used to the double standard when Islam is involved. The state promotes the idea that Islamically motivated actions are sinister in origin and should be viewed with suspicion. The media amplifies this insidious message, and the public is expected to unquestioningly follow suit.
The campaign to denigrate the status of Muslim marriages and promote the secular state as the protector of women has been steadily gaining pace, as this appeal court decision merely the latest manifestation of it. We wrote in 2017 an article entitled “Can the secular state really protect Muslim women?” in which we stated:
“In a society where almost one in eight fathers have no contact with their children, and the rise of unmarried relationships has contributed to the breakdown of family structures, it would be expected that focus would be on addressing these problems. Instead, the secular establishment has sought to use cultural values and marriage traditions as a way undermine Islam, in the hope that people will turn away from it, as it is portrayed as backward and oppressive.”
“The suggestion that British law should be changed to ‘protect’ Muslims from sham pseudo-Islamic marriages, is not a true solution, as it is akin to expecting the fox to protect the hens. Whilst some Muslims may be tempted by the immediacy of such a solution, we should all recognise that the British establishment cares no more about Muslim women here than they do about the millions of Muslim women left to suffer in Yemen, Myanmar, Syria or Iraq, as a direct result of their nefarious foreign policy. It is the same for the plight of all women in Britain who still struggle for any semblance of safety and dignity in a society whose liberal values have made it riddled with inequality, self-interest, misogyny, harassment and domestic abuse, to name just a few of its crimes against women-kind.”
The full article can be read at:
Yahya Nisbet
Media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain,
16th February 2020
