Thread: ISLAMIC TRIBUNAL CONFIRMED IN TEXAS; ATTORNEY CLAIMS ‘IT’S VOLUNTARY’

ISLAMIC TRIBUNAL CONFIRMED IN TEXAS; ATTORNEY CLAIMS ‘IT’S VOLUNTARY’


Islamic Tribunal Website

by BOB PRICE27 Jan 2015

An Islamic Tribunal using Sharia law in Texas has been confirmed by Breitbart Texas. The tribunal is operating as a non-profit organization in Dallas. One of the attorneys for the tribunal said participation and acceptance of the tribunal’s decisions are “voluntary.”

Breitbart Texas spoke with one of the “judges,” Dr. Taher El-badawi. He said the tribunal operates under Sharia law as a form of “non-binding dispute resolution.” El-badawi said their organization is “a tribunal, not arbitration.” A tribunal is defined by Meriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “a court or forum of justice.” The four Islamic attorneys call themselves “judges” not “arbitrators.”

El-badawi said the tribunal follows Sharia law to resolve civil disputes in family and business matters. He said they also resolve workplace disputes.

In matters of divorce, El-badawi said that “while participation in the tribunal is voluntary, a married couple cannot be considered divorced by the Islamic community unless it is granted by the tribunal.” He compared their divorce, known as “Talaq,” as something similar to the Catholic practice of annulment in that the church does not recognize civil divorce proceedings as ending a marriage.

He also said there is a difference between how a man and a woman can request a divorce under their system. “The husband can request the divorce directly from the tribunal,” El-badawi stated. “The wife must go to an Imam who will request the divorce for her.” He called it “two paths to the same result.” The practice of Khula is the process where a wife can initiate a divorce proceeding and where the husband can agree to the divorce in exchange for a financial compensation. It appears the wife must agree to give up any claim to the “dower” that was not already paid or to return it if it has already been paid. Once the financial issues are resolved the husband can then proclaim the Talaq (divorce).

El-badawi said they follow Texas family law when it comes to child support, visitation, and custody. He said that in most cases, custody of children is awarded to the mother.

Breitbart Texas asked what happens when there is a conflict between Sharia law and Texas law. El-badawi said most of the time, the laws are in agreement. When pushed further he admitted that, “we follow Sharia law.” However, he explained, “If the parties are not satisfied with the tribunal’s decision, they do not have to accept it and they can take the matter to Texas civil courts.” He did not say what the social ramifications of rejecting the “judge’s” decision would be.

The website for the Islamic Tribunal states, “The courts of the United States of America are costly and consist of ineffective lawyers. Discontent with the legal system leads many Muslims in America to postpone justice in this world and opt for an audience on the Day of Judgment.”

It goes on to state, “It is with this issue that Muslims here in America are obligated to find a way to solve conflicts and disputes according to the principles of Islamic Law and its legal heritage of fairness and justice in a manner that is reasonable and cost effective.”

In explaining Sharia law, the website states, “Stoning adulterers, cutting of the hands, polyandry and the like (all can be traced in the relevant literature and can be explained in their Islamic legal mentality and rational context in fairness and justice), are mainly a part of Islamic Criminal Law. In fact criminal law within Islam only makes up a fraction of the Shari’ah. It is unscholarly and unfair to generalize that type of understanding, that is Criminal Law, to compromise the whole of Islamic law if we stick to speaking in technical terms.”

The website lists four “judges:” Imam Yusuf Z.Kavakci, Imam Moujahed Bakhach, Imam Zia ul Haque Sheikh and Dr. El-badawi. It states the Islamic Tribunal resolves business disputes, divorce (Talaq) cases, community problems, serious family problems, and Khula.

El-badawi restated several times that participation in the tribunal is voluntary. However, he would not discuss what happens to someone who did not follow their rulings.
http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/...says-attorney/

When God and the Law Don’t Square

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: February 17, 2008
Correction Appended

A PRETTY good way to generate an outcry, as the archbishop of Canterbury learned in Britain recently, is to say that a Western legal system should make room for Shariah, or Islamic law. When the archbishop, spiritual leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, commented in a radio interview that such an accommodation was “unavoidable,” critics conjured images of stonings and maimings, overwhelming his more modest point.

Peter and Maria Hoey

The archbishop, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, did not propose importing Shariah into the criminal law and was referring mostly to divorces in which both sides have agreed to abide by the judgment of a religious tribunal. His proposal was groundbreaking only in extending to Islamic tribunals in Britain a role that Jewish and Christian ones have long played in the judicial systems of secular societies.

Courts in the United States have endorsed all three kinds of tribunals.

In 2003, for instance, a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local tribunal called the Texas Islamic Court.

In 2005, the federal appeals court in New Orleans affirmed an award in an employment arbitration by the Institute for Christian Conciliation, which uses Biblical teachings to settle disputes.

And state courts routinely enforce the decisions made by a Jewish court, known as a bet din, in commercial and family law cases.

The outcry in Britain was apparently something of a visceral reaction to aspects of Islamic law, though the archbishop himself condemned what he called the inhumanity of “extreme punishments” and some Islamic countries’ “attitudes toward women.”

The larger question, legal experts in the United States said, is whether government courts should ever defer to religious ones.

The answer may depend on whether the people involved authentically consented to religious adjudication, whether they are allowed to change their minds and whether the decisions of those tribunals are offensive to fundamental conceptions of justice.

All of that, said John Witte Jr., a law professor at Emory University, “is the big frontier question for religious liberty.”

The archbishop speaks in sonorous circumlocutions and he was not a model of clarity when he was interviewed by BBC radio on Feb. 7. Even his followers had a hard time untangling just what he meant.

“I’m an Episcopalian,” said Janice A. Schattman, the lawyer in the Texas case who persuaded the appeals court to defer to the Islamic one. “Rowan Williams, bless his heart, can be quite obscure.”

But the archbishop’s central point seemed to be that people should be able to agree to have family law cases resolved by religious courts if all concerned agree.

By Monday the archbishop was backtracking, saying he had spoken clumsily with “a misleading choice of words.”

Azizah Y. al-Hibri, the president of Karamah, an international lawyers’ group based in Washington and made up of Muslim women, said she applauded the archbishop’s initial position.

“Muslims, Christians and Jews should all deal with their own family law issues in their own arbitration councils,” she said. “The government should stay out of the bedroom.”

That notion has met resistance where Islam is involved.

After the authorities in Ontario raised the possibility that arbitrators might use Shariah to settle family disputes, formal recognition of all religious arbitrations there, including existing Catholic and Jewish ones, was withdrawn.

“There will be one law for all Ontarians,” Dalton McGuinty, the province’s premier, said in 2005.

Almost no one suggests that criminal law should take into account the defendant’s religion in meting out punishment. At the other extreme, few people object to allowing purely commercial disputes between sophisticated business people to be adjudicated through private arbitrations.

The hard questions, as the archbishop learned, arise in the area of family law, where the agreement to arbitrate may be uninformed or obtained by duress. State courts have occasionally refused to enforce separation agreements reached through bet din arbitrations on the ground that the woman involved had been pressured into participating.

Once consent is given, moreover, questions arise about whether and when it may be withdrawn. “People have a right in Western systems to change religions,” said Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Michigan.

“Can they opt out after the dispute arises or after the judgment is given?”

Most fundamentally, some judgments from religious tribunals may be at odds with constitutional protections, human rights and basic notions of fairness.

In an article to be published shortly in The Washington and Lee Law Review, Robin Fretwell Wilson, a law professor at Washington and Lee University, wrote that Muslim women who decide to seek a divorce can face harsh financial consequences under Islamic law.

“Threatened with the prospect of certain poverty,” she wrote, “some women will surely be forced to stay in an abusive relationship.”

Professor Wilson said in an interview that government courts should refuse to enforce any ruling from a religious tribunal that leaves a woman worse off than she would have been in a conventional divorce.

“Society has a stake in the outcome,” she said. “Some religions are tilted against women.”

In the Texas case, however, it was a woman, Rola Qaddura, who sought arbitration in a dispute over a dowry and the distribution of assets after a divorce. The parties had signed an agreement to arbitrate their case “according to the Islamic rules of law by Texas Islamic Court” in Richardson.

The appeals court said the agreement was valid. Ms. Schattman, who represented Ms. Qaddura, said the appeals court’s ruling was proper and unexceptional. “An agreement to arbitrate is an agreement to arbitrate,” she said.

In the end, though, the arbitration didn't go forward after a lower court there granted a motion to set aside the parties’ arbitration agreement. Ms. Schattman said of the Islamic court: “It was kind of a new thing.”

Correction: October 19, 2008
An article on Feb. 17 about religious tribunals misstated the reason an arbitration before the Texas Islamic Court did not go forward. A Texas appeals court had authorized arbitration before the tribunal in a divorce case, but a lower court there granted a motion to set aside the parties’ arbitration agreement. The arbitration did not fail to proceed because, as a lawyer involved in the appeal had said, the parties could not agree on a panel of arbitrators. The error was pointed out last month in an e-mail message by Rola Qaddura, a party to the case.

More Articles in Week in Review »A version of this article appeared in print on February 17, 2008, on page WK3 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/we.../17liptak.html