British Islam and English Law

Woke values have paralysed the UK’s legislative response to minority communities, writes David Martin Jones.

Whether it is calls to censor films considered blasphemous, grooming gangs preying on vulnerable girls or even murderous acts of terrorism, it can seem as if some British Muslim communities exist beyond the reach of the UK’s legal system. An assumption that laws are applied selectively, or penalise the critics rather than the perpetrators of immoral acts, reinforces the insularity of minority groups and threatens social cohesion. We need to understand how this situation has come about in order to begin to challenge it.

‘Conventional jurisprudence has proved itself inadequate to the task of conceptualising the relationship between Islam and English law’, writes Patrick Nash in his study British Islam and English Law. A barrister and legal historian by training, Nash is ideally qualified to explore the issues British Islam raises for the rule of law and offer some provocative solutions.

His work demonstrates how woefully Britain’s institutions have grappled with the problems that Muslim groups and their transnational clan networks pose for a secular, liberal democratic order. Through deconstructing British Islam, Nash explores how the prevalence of progressive liberal and multiculturalist theories of justice have perversely misunderstood the nature of British Islam and how this misrecognition has paralysed the way that the British legal system, under successive UK governments, has responded to Muslim communities.