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.

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.

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.

Shari'a is not just the Qur'an, you see Shari'a is comprised according to all the doctrines. There's consensus and analogy - argument by analogy. These are the four components in the Shari'a. An orthodox Sunni would not accept that the Shari'a was simply comprised of the Qur'an itself and actually there are people who say that it's heretical to believe that. They have to say that because if they don't say that then they would have to accept that, for example, stoning is not a punishment which appears in the Qur'an - it doesn't.

There were periods in Islamic history when things like apostasy and blasphemy were made punishable. So you know it kind of depends - there's no argument, quite apart from the question of the divine or otherwise nature of the Qur'an, that huge swathes of Islamic law are man-made. Clerics here - in maintaining their power, will often try to elide that and say "Well no, actually this isn't man-made at all. Stoning is part of the divine revelation." It isn't in the Qur'an but the way this has been done over the years is to take the Hadith.

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.

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.