What could possibly go wrong?

When the Vienna Regional Court for Civil Matters permitted the enforcement of an arbitration ruling based explicitly on Sharia law, the decision passed largely without international notice.

Yet its implications are profound – not merely for Austria, but for Europe as a whole. At stake is nothing less than whether the continent retains its secular constitutional foundations, or whether it drifts into the dangerous territory of legal pluralism, where parallel systems of justice compete against the law of the land.

Parallel but not comparable. Allah hates women; Quranic law is not fair to women, to put it mildly.

Critics are right to warn that this ruling risks legitimising “parallel societies.” For decades, European leaders have wrestled with the failure of integration policies. In cities from Malmö to Marseille, segregated communities have emerged in which religious authority often supplants the secular state. Informal Sharia councils already exist in parts of Britain, where Muslim women in particular have been pressured to submit to tribunals that deny them equal rights. The danger is not hypothetical – it is happening within the EU.

Sharia councils can be “informal” and still treat women like garbage.

Supporters of the ruling may argue that it is a harmless recognition of cultural diversity. If two consenting adults wish to settle disputes under Sharia, why should the state intervene? But this framing is profoundly misleading. Law is not merely a private contract; it is the foundation of citizenship. To permit religious codes to replace civil law is to suggest that citizens can opt out of the social contract altogether.

Also there’s the question of those “two consenting adults.” How consenting is the woman? How will any outsider know? How free will she be to refuse to consent?

Get serious. Men who want Sharia are not likely to see their wives as a consenting adult; they’re far more likely to see them as the inferior half of the couple and the source of the all-important sons, who must be fiercely watched and disciplined less they spread their legs for an outsider which the men will be tricked into raising. Can’t have that.