i just did a quick search on this guy Withington or Barcode whatever his name is and i found that the posting came from his blog that he has copied and pasted onto here,last two sentences he omitted from the posting reads.

"Fuck Islam and fuck woolly-minded liberal do-gooders with their empire guilt.
There is no way Dr Williams should be presiding over an organisation that has England in its name"!

i think we can detect from the tone used here that he has certain right wing imperialist leanings.
read more from him if you can stand it at.
 http://barcode.deedah.org/

The issue is NOT about imposing Sharia law over English law (though I'll come back to that) but whether contracting parties can stipulate in their contract any damned arbitration procedure they wish to as an alternative to the civil court and whether the vivil courts will/should enforce THIS provision.

It is actually rather common that contracts contain variious clauses of this sort with regard to some part of the contract stipulating something other than what civil law would say AND the civil courts tned to uphold these stipulations (though I'll comt back to that).

So it shouldn't matter that the alternative arbitration specified is "according to Sharia law".

OK --- like usual the devil is in the details. What the civil courts usually require when making alternatives enforcable is that these were truly volunatrily agreed to. If one side drew up the contract and the other could only "take it or leave it" usual that any ambiguities be decided against the side which drew up the contract. And there is here the potential for abuse.

a) business contracts --- probably OK. There obviously is the alternative of obtaining loans through the conventional usury market so business deals arranged according to Sharia should be OK (non coercive).

b) marriage --- tougher here as there is "undo pressure". I'm writing from America and so don't know the British tradition with regard to "frauds" (not the usual sense of the word) but at least here contracts where marriage is a consideration fall under the "Statute of Frauds" which applies special considerations to what is or is not enforcable by the civil court. In other words, a contract where marriage is a consideration MAY be unenforcable if either party later doesn't wish to abide by the terms.

In other words I suspect that these contracts OK (acceptable by the civil court in lieue of civil court procedings -- here that would a probate, aka "family" court) PROVIDED both parties still wish that. The civil court MAY also agree to allow the specified arbitration to go forward even if one or the other party wants out but will scrutinize the situation before allowing this and there would be serious limitations on the deviations from civil law which the court would allow in this case.