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.

I think it's important to understand Shari'a to be rooted in history - what we know about the history and what we don't know about the history. So then, if people want to argue, at least they're arguing from the same point and we know what we know, and we know what we don't know.

I spoke to my father - my father's from Pakistan and he's also a lawyer - I said to him, "Well what does the Shari'a say?" And he said, "Well, of course it doesn't justify suicide bombs," but he didn't seem to know where the Shari'a came from or what it was all about. The more I asked people in my family as well as friends, the more I realized that there seemed to be widespread ignorance in the Muslim community. And that's something which I actually found to be the case over the next two and a half, three years I spent writing the book.

My background is such that I am uneasy about religious laws, I think there's always a real danger when you start appealing to a higher authority. It's self-righteousness, it's not righteousness, it's self-righteousness that takes control. But I think that it's absolutely crucial that that's not confused with the debate that takes place over Shari'a law in Great Britain at the moment. Because as far as anybody is concerned, when you talk about Shari'a courts now you're talking about - I don't know what people think.

The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, if you look at its website, it basically deals with commercial disputes, it's not allowed to deal with matters involving children, it's not allowed to deal with criminal matters, it's subject to judicial review, it's subject to the Human Rights Act, it's subject to the Children's Act, and it's completely proper and right that it should be subject to all those things.

The Shari'a itself - this is possibly a kind of verbal debate - is understood to be something different from the Fiqh, and the Fiqh is the man-made element and the Shari'a is theoretically the divine element but it depends on one's personal beliefs.

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.