One of things that surprised me when I was in Iran was to find out that the country finances seven times as many sex change operations as the entire ….

My background is such that I am uneasy about religious laws, I think there's always a real danger when you start appealing to a higher authority. It'….

There have been lots and lots of fatwas against violence. But it is an interesting question. A Mufti is the person that issues the fatwa and you'll f….

I think there's a real danger that Islamophobia can actually be a cover for something far more malign. I don't want to sound like a spokesman for the….

There were periods in Islamic history when things like apostasy and blasphemy were made punishable. So you know it kind of depends - there's no argum….

My father's from Pakistan and he has been a secularist all his life. In the Pakistani context, there's no messing with religion. There's been a battl….

The first rules about Islamic law weren't even written down for a century and a half after the Prophet's death, and it was another five centuries, ha….

I didn't quite know whether I was writing for the non-Muslim or the Muslim, and at the end of the day I'm writing, I hope, for people who are interes….

In 1979, you had the revolution in Iran. You had the Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan, which are the laws that are notoriously used against women, which….

The one fatwa that everyone here is probably familiar with is the Salman Rushdie fatwa, but a fatwa doesn't have to be a violent thing at all. A fatw….

There is an issue about the discrimination provisions because the Qur'an does say that women should have half the share of men. Again, in the seventh….

Whenever one writes a book one should have a notional reader in mind..

People are coupling and decoupling all the time in Great Britain. The fact that Muslims choose to precede it with a certain formula of words, shouldn….

The politicized version of Shia Islam that we see in the Islamic Republic post-1979 clearly is very conservative, but, there are other things one cou….

I work in the human rights field and there are serious conflicts between certain interpretations of Islamic law and human rights. That's something wh….

I was a teenager when General Zia took power in the Pakistan; I was in my twenties when I went there during the late 1980s and I saw then not only th….

There's a feminist critique of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals, which I'm certainly not unsympathetic to, because as I keep saying, I come from a human ….

Whereas a man is entitled to marry three more times and that fosters great abuse, even scholars accept that. So certainly since the 1980s Shari'a cou….

I realized that the ignorance was profound. I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, it's just that people didn't know what the Shari'a was, as such.….

Shari'a is not just the Qur'an, you see Shari'a is comprised according to all the doctrines. There's consensus and analogy - argument by analogy. The….

The Shari'a itself - this is possibly a kind of verbal debate - is understood to be something different from the Fiqh, and the Fiqh is the man-made e….