White Wedding Lies

The moment you introduce into a country, a religion whose adherents feel they can ignore its laws, in favour of its own ...

Southall Black Sisters: Meeting The Needs of Asian and African-Caribbean Women.

.....  then at the very least you introduce conflicts, and at worst you have been invaded.

In 2018, a British High Court Judge was asked to decide if a Muslim Sharia "nikah" marriage, conducted by an Iman in a Southall restaurant in 1998, makes the couple married under UK law. This despite the fact that they didn't have the registry office wedding, which the UK law requires if the ceremony wasn't held in a licensed wedding venue, a requirement which was confirmed in a review in 2017.

The 'illegal' wedding was between a British solicitor, Mohammed Shabaz Khan (who one can't help thinking knew exactly what he was doing by ignoring our wedding laws), and his 'bride', Nasreen Akhter. She apparently believed that although it was an Islamic faith marriage, she would be allowed to be divorced by a UK court, and presumably claim cash/maintenance after the divorce was finalised (they have four children, for whom child maintenance will be required regardless of their marriage status). The 'husband' however insisted that as it was a Sharia ceremony only, she therefore can't be divorced by a UK court annulment, as no legal marriage status existed, and that they had not been married in an official sense. 

The couple had separated in 2016, and the woman had petitioned the UK courts for a 'divorce'. which he had tried to block, but the High Court initially ruled in 2018 that the couple's Islamic "nikah" ceremony did fall within English marriage law, and granted an annulment to the woman. But the Attorney General appealed this, and in February 2020, the Appeal Court reversed that decision, and said it was an "invalid" non-legal ceremony. The appeal judges said the fact the couple had intended to have a further civil ceremony (but never did, despite the woman raising the matter several times over the years), meant they obviously had both  known that their Islamic marriage had no legal effect in the UK.

 

Pragna Patel, a director from Southall Black Sisters an activist organisation, said: "Today's judgement will force Muslim and other women to turn to Sharia 'courts' that already cause significant harm to women and children, for remedies because they are now locked out of the civil justice system." But this is not actually correct ... as under UK common law arrangements, the couple were still widely seen as 'married' within their, and the wider community.

 

Therefore the woman would be entitled to make a court claim for some share of the family wealth accrued during their common law marriage, and regardless of that claim being successful or not, the children of their union would still be legally entitled to child maintenance. But a Muslim woman (and indeed any other woman), who had not got legally married, would not be entitled to a decree of annulment of their relationship (as there is no marriage to annul) ... so she would have to apply to an illegal Sharia court to get the religious Sharia divorce she wanted.  

We reap what we sow.