Anecdotally, there are many Muslim couples in Britain who do not have a civil registry marriage but only an unregistered ‘nikah’. However, there are no accurate statistics on precise numbers. Requests for information and support regarding marriage and divorce are the most frequent requests received by the Muslim Women’s Network UK. Unregistered nikahs are a matter of ...

Muslim Institute Fellow Usama Hasan offers his perspective on Islamic reform by asking an age old question in an article re-printed from his personal blog. With the Name of Allah, All-Merciful, Most Merciful Have you stopped beating your wife? The plain truth about domestic violence and the 'wife-beating' verse of the Qur'an. Including a holistic study of important but ...

For more than three decades now, I have given these three words a great deal of earnest consideration: Islam, Gender and Justice, writes Amina Wadud. I have also organised these three words in accordance to whatever priority I felt was most impelling at the time. Because of my enduring love for Islam as a member of the faith by volition, a convert in the 1970’s, the emphasis on Islam ...

There is great misunderstanding both among believers and non-believers about what it means to be religious, writes Asghar Ali Engineer. For most of the believers religion is a set of rituals, appearance or even a set of dogmas and superstitions whereas for non-believers (rationalists and empiricists) it is nothing but irrational beliefs, dogmas and superstitions, which impede human progress ...

Read the text of a lecture presented by the Muslim Institute and delivered by Dr Rajaa Naji el Mekkaoui, an expert in family law at the Université Mohamed V in Rabat and one of the architects of the mourchidat programme Moudawana (Morocco Family Code): Symbol of reconciliation between sacred religious texts and constraints of our time. The ...