Are Russia’s Muslims Now Going to Stop Talking about Shariat Courts in Order to Spread Use of Islamic Law There?

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 30 – A conference in Nalchik last week on “Islamic Legal Culture in Present-Day Russia” urged that those who favor the spread of the values of Islamic law should stop talking about “shariat courts” because of the widespread view that those institutions are intertwined with Islamist terrorism.

            In its resolution, a blogger who writes under the name “A Woman’s View from Nalchik,” the meeting, which included scholars, Muslim leaders and officials from across Russia and even abroad, made precisely that argument (kavkaz-uzel.eu/blogs/83787/posts/40704).

            “The incorrect use of the term ‘shariat court’ has given rise in public opinion to an association with terrorist lynch law of international band formations … [Thus] all spiritual administrations are recommended to refrain from this term as applied to the realities of the secular Russian state,” the blogger quotes.

                But “’you can’t take the words out of a song,” the Woman’s View from Nalchik writer quotes with approval.  “Islamic legal culture is nothing other than shariat, and kadys are shariat judges.  In London, for example, shariat courts function as such.” And she refers to presentations at the conference which show that is the case in Russia as well.

            Having made these observations, some might expect that the blogger is opposed to shariat courts in Russia and hopes to stop them from spreading. In fact, the reverse is true. She appears upset about the subterfuge that the conference proposes because she believes that shariat courts can play a valuable role in Muslim life.

            She says that in her republic, Kabardino-Balkaria, where the divorce rate is now 50 percent of all marriages, shariat courts which operate on the principle of agreement rather than orders and which can render their decisions far more quickly than civil courts, can help save marriages by intervening early rather than late in the process.

            That is something that the Women’s View from Nalchik blogger says she and others can only welcome. There is no need to hide this valuable contribution.