Legal pluralism tied to a colonial past

Every few years, a familiar anxiety resurfaces in British public discourse: that sharia law is establishing a parallel legal system and threatening the sovereignty of English law.

- FEMI OWOLADE

Those fears were reignited following Donald Trump's recent speech to the UN, where he claimed that London wants "to go to sharia law".

Such claims ignore two realities. First, that the English legal system is adaptive and capable of accommodating diversity. And second, that having multiple legal systems is - far from undermining British law - an inevitable legacy of Britain's colonial history. Looking to that history, it should be no surprise that it is a feature of modern, multicultural Britain.

My research shows how British colonial administrators deliberately designed plural legal systems to sustain imperial rule. The colonial state recognised that it could not rule diverse populations by imposing English law on multicultural societies.

In northern Nigeria, this approach became a defining feature of colonial governance. English law operated alongside Islamic courts, which handled family disputes and aspects of land tenure. Allowing limited autonomy for Africans under sharia was both a pragmatic and political strategy. It maintained local legitimacy while ensuring that English law remained supreme in cases of conflict. A similar arrangement existed in British India. This legacy continues to shape how law functions in postcolonial, multicultural Britain today. There is no separate sharia legal system in the UK. What exist are sharia councils and the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal. The sharia councils have no statutory authority under English law. They may be used to resolve personal disputes such as marriage, divorce and inheritance.