The first thing to say is that the ordinary criminal law in this country, the Human Rights Act, the Children's Act, all of the laws of the country take precedence, but what I'm also saying is that within the context of a secular country, which Britain now kind of is, or at least a country which purports to be relatively equal between religions, there should be some scope for allowing faith communities to govern themselves - subject to it being consensual and subject to everyone's human rights being observed.

I realized that the ignorance was profound. I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, it's just that people didn't know what the Shari'a was, as such. They knew that it was something good. I should say perhaps that the Shari'a, etymologically in Arabic, means a desert path to water. It means a path towards salvation, in the seventh-century context, to the desert people. If you have a path to water, that's the path you want to take to get you where you want to get to; where you should get to. And that much was clear but beyond that people didn't know what the rules were.

There have been lots and lots of fatwas against violence. But it is an interesting question. A Mufti is the person that issues the fatwa and you'll find Muftis at all the Madrasas. Basically once you've studied for long enough you have the authority to issue a fatwa. But there are limits. I can bang on and on on the point but all I'm really saying is that there isn't a simple answer.

I didn't quite know whether I was writing for the non-Muslim or the Muslim, and at the end of the day I'm writing, I hope, for people who are interested, whatever their faith. Even if they don't have any faith. As a barrister I had certain advantages - I could think like a lawyer and I knew how all the laws were fitted together and all the rest of it. One of the things I realized pretty early on while I was writing book about Shari'a was that that was as much a hinderance as it was a help because the Shari'a isn't just a system of rules.

The first rules about Islamic law weren't even written down for a century and a half after the Prophet's death, and it was another five centuries, half a millennium, before they assumed anything like a definitive form. So there have always been huge arguments over what Islamic law actually requires. There are four main schools of law in Sunni thought and there's a separate school of law in Shia thought, so these arguments do take place.

There is an issue about the discrimination provisions because the Qur'an does say that women should have half the share of men. Again, in the seventh century perhaps that kind of made sense, but in the twenty-first it very often doesn't. But in the arbitration contract that won't arise. An inheritance dispute might arise after someone dies but the two sides have to come together consensually.

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.