I think it's important to understand Shari'a to be rooted in history - what we know about the history and what we don't know about the history. So th….

One of the big problems in this field is that there's so much mystification that surrounds talk of the Shari'a, whether its saying that Islam is all ….

The first thing to say is that the ordinary criminal law in this country, the Human Rights Act, the Children's Act, all of the laws of the country ta….

If Muslims want to take their disputes to religious arbitrators because they genuinely believe that it's a matter of great spiritual importance that ….

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….

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….

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….

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….

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….

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….

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….

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'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 ….

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'….

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….

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 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….

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

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….

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….

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….