There's really no such thing as just Sharia, it's not one monolithic Continuum - Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it's understood in many different ways.

Sharia is the most oppressive system on earth. It encourages people to lie, if it's for the benefits of Islam. It doesn't allow Muslims to leave Islam, and there's a death penalty in all the schools of Sharia against those that leave Islam. Sharia defines what jihad is.

Speaking as a Muslim in the West, I see a crisis in religious authority, we need Indigenous Muslim scholarship understanding the Western way of life and is able to use the understanding, using legitimate Islamic sources to bring more scholarship to our way of life in the west. There's a need for that.

There are some disturbing messages in the Koran, there were declarations of war against non-believers, there's a declaration that Islam should be triumphant over other religions, the problem is this is not just in the book, but preached throughout the Islamic world that are preached, we in the West hear about that.

We must recognise - both Muslims and non- Muslims, that the Koran is a text. We need human engagement with that text, so we have to understand that the rulings and the legal rulings are produced are channelled through the human mind, it's an interpretive act of a human being engaging and interacting with a text producing legal results. Because of that it's susceptible to flaws, it is not perfect. Nobody has perfect access to the divine will.

Multiculturalism is only in the West. We are absorbing a large number of Muslims in the west and at the same time the Christians and the Jews and other minorities are fleeing the Middle East, churches are being burnt, nobody is talking about it. Where are the religious freedom of the minorities.

There are three foundational issues or three divisions that I should say that Sharia fits into, one is penal law of course and that is what gets all the attention, there's two countries in the world right now that actually have a Federal mandate to enact penal law according to the Sharia, that's Saudi Arabia, and Iran.