I work in the human rights field and there are serious conflicts between certain interpretations of Islamic law and human rights. That's something which I don't make any bones about at all, it's something which I think is very important for everyone to address, including the Muslim community, and many Muslims are addressing that issue.

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.

There's crucial distinction that has to be drawn between the Shari'a, which is this hugely expansive vision of cosmic order that I've been describing, and principles of Islamic law, known in Arabic as "Fiqh" - a word that means understanding. If you're a devout Muslim, you don't argue against the Shari'a; the Shari'a is the path that God has laid down. But what you can do, and what people are doing all the time, is arguing over the correct interpretation of the Shari'a, arguing over the Fiqh. That's something that has been going on throughout Islamic history.

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.

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.

The politicized version of Shia Islam that we see in the Islamic Republic post-1979 clearly is very conservative, but, there are other things one could say about Ayatollah Khomeini's concept of a Shia state because that in itself is a blasphemy as far as most Shia clerics are concerned. There's a theory that he developed in the early 1960s in the town of Najaf talking about - well not liberalism, necessarily, but flexibility though.

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.