LONDON: It was a clear case of irreconcilable differences.

The wife said there was no love left in the marriage, she wanted a divorce. The husband insisted that she had been put under the influence of a “taweez”, a talisman, that had erased her affections for him. He refused to divorce.

“The husband says he has been pushed away from his home because of this taweez business,” said Sheik Haitham al-Haddad, a judge in North London’s Sharia council, a panel of Muslim scholars gathered in a backroom of London’s biggest mosque to determine whether the woman should be granted a divorce under Islamic law.

For British Muslims, many of whom have one foot in Piccadilly Circus and the other in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Somalia, the British legal system is available, as it is to all. But it is singularly impotent when it comes to civil issues such as marriage, divorce and other disputes whose dispensation in heaven often is perceived as more crucial than any ruling that might be handed down by an English judge in a horsehair wig.

A tumultuous debate was set off in Britain this year when the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said it was time to consider “crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom”. Eventually, he hinted, this could mean allowing Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims to seek legal recourse in Islamic courts in certain limited cases, such as marriage and divorce, as an alternative to the civil court system.Little known to the general public, though, is that Sharia is being applied quietly every day in Britain, via Sharia councils that dispense Islamic civil justice in more than half a dozen mosques across the country.

The councils do not involve themselves in criminal law or any aspects of civil law in which they would be in direct conflict with British civil codes. The vast majority of their cases cover marriage and divorce. By consent of all parties, they also may arbitrate issues of property, child custody, housing and employment disputes, although their rulings are not binding unless submitted to the civilian courts.“It is known that English judges are willing to accept agreements like this that are reached in Sharia courts, as long as it has been put into proper form,” said Mohammed Siddique, a paralegal who advises the Sharia council in Dewsbury, in northern England, on the technicalities of British law.

“It saves time and hassle for the court, and it shows that both parties are willing to compromise and reach some sort of agreement.”

In some cases, women have no trouble obtaining a divorce in civil court but run into unforeseen difficulties when they approach Muslim scholars to seal it with their blessing.

A few weeks ago, a Somali woman whose husband had been wounded and subsequently disappeared during the turmoil in her homeland several years ago approached the Sharia council in North London. She was accompanied by her neighbour, who had been helping her care for her children, and had offered to marry her if she obtained an Islamic divorce in addition to her civil divorce.

Instead of the expected rubber stamp, the couple got a tongue lashing.

“How do you allow a man who is not your husband to interfere with your life? He’s proposing to marry you while you’re already married? How come, sister?” Haddad asked.

“Because I haven’t seen my husband in eight years,” said the woman, looking confused and a little panicky.

“And you, brother,” Haddad said, turning to the man, “do you allow this for any one of your relatives, that she is married, and while she is married, you allow someone to interfere?”

“I didn’t interfere with her, and Allah knows I didn’t interfere,” the man said.

The judges told the woman to find a Somali cleric, who might be able to help her prove her husband is dead, or had abandoned her. Should that happen, they said, she could have her divorce, and marry whom she pleased.

Government officials have raised no objections to the councils, which first emerged in 1982 in Birmingham, because they operate in cooperation with British civil law, and British courts still issue all necessary legal decrees. People who advocate granting some official status to the councils’ deliberations, as the archbishop of Canterbury seemed to suggest, point out that Jews in Britain operate religious courts whose rulings, when all parties voluntarily participate, are recognised under civil law as a form of binding arbitration.

“Almost everything, Muslims living in Britain, or other societies that traditionally have not been Muslim societies, can arrange for themselves. They can arrange to have food slaughtered in halal fashion. They can set up Islamic financial instruments. They can build mosques. The one key area where there’s a vacuum regards the access of women to divorce,” said John R. Bowen, professor of anthropology at Missouri’s Washington University, explaining the need for the Sharia councils.

Under many interpretations of Islamic law, men easily can obtain a divorce known as “talaq” by simply declaring their intention three times. A woman, however, usually needs the pronouncement of a Muslim judge who is a scholar in the field of Islamic jurisprudence.

“In most other European countries, there is no such council or judge. Many imams are approached at the mosque and asked, ‘Can you give me an Islamic divorce?’ And they have to say, ‘I have no standing to do that,’” Bowen said.Suhaib Hasan, who sits on the North London council, said it tries to complement the work of the British civil courts. At the same time, he said, the Sharia council offers divorces that are less expensive and quicker than those available in the British courts, although a civil decree is still needed for legal dissolution of the marriage, and in the case of any property or child custody disputes.

“A woman can get a divorce from the civil court, but she will still come to us,” he said. “Why? Because she has to satisfy her conscience as well. And in this way, we are providing a service to the Muslim community, and complementing the British legal system.”

Shawzia, a 32-year-old physician who obtained a “khula”, the Islamic term for when a woman ends a marriage, through the London mosque this year, said her civil divorce didn’t feel sufficient.

“Before this happened, I didn’t consider myself divorced, spiritually,” she said. “I couldn’t move on with my life. I needed completion. I still felt married.”

In the case of the judges foundering over what they saw as the irrelevant issue of the taweez, the husband said he had paid about $10,000 to have the spell undone, but it seemed to have been wasted money.

“It seems these taweez people are just going into business now, one doing taweez, the other undoing taweez,” said Hasan, with just a trace of irritation.

“We cannot take into consideration taweez in deciding Sharia matters,” said the council president, Mohammed Abu Said.

What to do? Call in the parties, see who might still love whom.

“A meeting should take place,” Hasan declared, and the judges flipped to the next document in their thick stacks of troubled lives.—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times