Most Muslim countries, for their part, long ago recognized the utility of secular laws to supplement or even supersede sharia. To governments seeking to build states in a fast-paced, competitive, and increasingly complex world, traditional Islamic law came to be seen not as too rigidas Hirsi Ali would have itbut rather as too unpredictable, too open to the vagaries of individual interpretation by judges with little knowledge of the world outside scripture.
Keen to catch up with Europe, the Ottoman Empire sharply restricted the role of sharia courts in the mid-nineteenth century, ending in the process most legal distinctions between Muslims and other subjects. Tossing out reams of accumulated Islamic jurisprudence in the matter, the Bey of Tunis summarily abolished slavery in 1846, two decades before the United States. In the early twentieth century Egypt adopted largely French and Turkey largely Swiss law codes. Among the few modern countries that continue to declare sharia the sole law of the land, Saudi Arabia nevertheless has since the 1960s used civil law to regulate commerce, as a matter of pragmatism.
Such evolutions remain tentative, incomplete, and contested. Turkey in recent decades has seen a backlash against the secularization imposed nearly a century ago by Kemal Atatürk. Egypt, for its part, has struggled repeatedly to arrive at a constitution that appears to give primacy to sharia while effectively confining religious law within the bounds of civil codes; its laws are today a messy tangle of sharia-based and secular rules. In an appeal to populism in Pakistan in the 1980s, the dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq pursued a radical program to revive application of sharia, including severe punishments for such crimes as blasphemy; Pakistani governments in the decades since have tried to back away from some of its more controversial aspects.
Where courts are crowded and corrupt, which is all too often the case in poorer Muslim countries, sharia retains a strong pull as an imagined panacea, a fact reflected in opinion polls. And in places such as Somalia or Afghanistan where the central government has collapsed or lost legitimacy, Muslim societies have often reverted to laws based more explicitly on scripture, including extreme punishments such as cutting off the hand of a thief. Some Muslims in minority communities, meanwhile, have turned in on themselves, creating what some describe as Islamic ghettoes in places such as the suburbs of Paris, or Bradford and Birmingham in England.
when Fenderputty types shouted it down before it even had a chance to be scrutinized. It doesn't affect me personally as I wouldn't use that (optional) system but it was definitely a squandered opportunity to get an approach to 'Sharia' that included quite a lot of contemporary Western rigour. (Edit: And is compatible with the Western secular system)