The Islamists are a coalition of sharia courts (hence their official name).
Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Phillips, the former Lord Chief Justice, argued in 2008 that Sharia courts should be used to resolve disputes among Muslims.
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Such drama is largely absent from Malaysia's sharia courts, which operate in parallel with civil ones and deal mostly with family law for the Muslim majority, annulling marriages and adjudicating custody disputes.
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In an attempt to counter the proliferation of these courts, a Bill has been tabled in the House of Lords by Baroness Cox calling for Sharia courts to be outlawed where they conflict with the British legal system.
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They have a clearer vision, not just for building clinics and Islamic schools but for setting up an emirate to encompass all of Somalia as well as the Somali-inhabited parts of neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya to be run by austere sharia courts.
Despite Malaysia's constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, its Supreme Court ruled, in an important test case, that Lina Joy, a 43-year-old woman who wants to convert officially from Islam to Christianity, cannot do so without the approval of Islamic sharia courts.
Nonsense, retort its supporters, the government will enforce sharia but the courts will interpret it.
What this has to do with the legality of the Oklahoma referendum barring the use of sharia law from the Oklahoma courts, I have no idea.
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In Oklahoma, they want to forbid state courts from making reference to Islamic Sharia law.
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Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia Law.
Hindus and Christians object that members of their communities will be allowed to serve neither as judges nor as advocates at Islamic courts likely to be set up under sharia.
Meanwhile, Oklahomans overwhelmingly voted to amend their state constitution to ban international law specifically sharia law from being used in their state courts.
Criticism of the Oklahoma constitutional amendment (Question 755), which prohibits state courts from "considering or using" international law or sharia, was expected.
Further, because the term "sharia" comes with no real description, it is hard to know exactly how the courts will ultimately interpret this term.
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