There is a crisis of religious authority world wide, and there are many reasons. One is colonialism.

One of the challenges that happened in Europe is that in accepting many Muslim people they didn't explain to them that those countries have particular values like equality of all people before the law. Islam does not accept people are equal before the law.

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.

Everyone interprets something in a different way, it's channelled through the human mind.

In the United States we have all across this country, we have dozens of Halakha courts, in which particularly observant Jews can take these issues of family law to an orthodox Court and have that judge, judge for them. As long as the courts don't violate the laws of the land and as long as there's a room for appeal should one or two parties disagree with the verdict, I don't see how this would have anything to do with being incompatible with what we refer to as Western ideas of democracy.

When you say Sharia, even to a Muslim, it's understood in vastly different ways, in many ways it's part of an identity and most Muslims when they talk about wanting Sharia to play a role in their lives really mean it in so far as it talks about family law, you know, issues like, as I said marriage, divorce.

The Middle East is rejecting any other religions, so it's a one sided multiculturalism.