Free Republic

As reported in the UK Independent (10/14/10), president of the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain, Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, has reiterated alarming comments made during a March, 2010 interview, sanctioning marital rape. Sheikh Sayeed was in fact responding to an inchoate effort at modernizing the contracts which govern Muslim marriages in Britain. The good Sheikh, representing Britain’s main Islamic Sharia court, the Islamic Sharia Council, promptly published a rebuttal of the contract, which included a statement on sexual abuse (page 6 here). He opined in the March interview:Clearly there cannot be any “rape” within the marriage. Maybe “aggression”, maybe “indecent...

Islamic punishments, such as the amputation of limbs, will make Britain a safer place, the founder of the country’s oldest sharia court told The Times. Sheikh Suhaib Hasan, secretary of the Islamic Sharia Council, said the enforcement of such laws was “something to bring you more peace and security”. Hasan, who presides over a sharia court in East London that rules on civil matters such as divorce, emphasised that he neither sought nor expected the implementation of Islamic criminal laws in Britain because it was not a Muslim country. However, he said problems such as ‘knife crimes’ would be better...