I was a teenager when General Zia took power in the Pakistan; I was in my twenties when I went there during the late 1980s and I saw then not only the novel punishments that he was introducing - because they were novel, and this is again something that's very important to understand, it's only in the last thirty, forty years, since 1979 in fact, that these penalties have been revived anywhere in the world apart from Saudi Arabia.

There's a feminist critique of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals, which I'm certainly not unsympathetic to, because as I keep saying, I come from a human rights context. But there's a feminist critique of Muslim Arbitration Tribunals specifically, which says women are going to have their rights eroded by virtue of the fact of these courts are going to negotiate settlements and negotiate the dropping of criminal charges against men. There's not been any evidence of that taking place.

What we shouldn't do is victimize and target Muslim communities specifically. But as things stand, there's one tribunal which has drawn a lot of flack - the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal.

Whereas a man is entitled to marry three more times and that fosters great abuse, even scholars accept that. So certainly since the 1980s Shari'a courts have been established and they allow for women to go to them and they basically grant them annulment. It's not a civil divorce, they don't have the right to grant alimony or maintenance or custody.

My father's from Pakistan and he has been a secularist all his life. In the Pakistani context, there's no messing with religion. There's been a battle for the soul of Pakistan since 1947 and I have grown up without any illusions about the dangers of religious power in the context of a country like Pakistan.

People are coupling and decoupling all the time in Great Britain. The fact that Muslims choose to precede it with a certain formula of words, shouldn't bar them from anything. But, no one's saying that polygamy should be institutionalized in this country. That Muslim's uniquely should be allowed to have two or three or four marriages.

One of the big problems in this field is that there's so much mystification that surrounds talk of the Shari'a, whether its saying that Islam is all about peace or whether its people saying that Islam is all about Jihad and all about suicide bombs. People will make statements which don't seem to be backed up by any sort of historical context.