A new path?

If you glanced at the front page of The Times for 1 February, with its headline “High Court opens way to Sharia divorces”, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the court had made some important pronouncement on the role of Sharia (Islamic law) in divorce proceedings. The story’s first paragraph would also have led you naturally to that conclusion. “The prospect of divorce cases being settled by Sharia and religious courts”, it said, “has been opened up by a landmark legal decision.” So it would have come as a bit of a jolt to read the start of the next paragraph: “A Jewish couple have had their divorce settlement under Beth Din, rabbinical law, approved by the High Court.” As this indicates, the case (AI v MT [2013] EWHC 100 (Fam)) says nothing whatsoever about Sharia.

This is not to downplay the significance of the case. As the second paragraph of the Times story went on to note, this