The government is looking into whether the Netherlands, like Great Britain, should allow some kind of Sharia law. The idea terrifies Dutch politicians because Islamic law means inequality between men and women. Everyone in the Dutch political world is also well aware that Freedom Party leader and anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders is bound to make enormous electoral mileage from it.
 
Stoning. Chopping off hands. Whippings and beatings. When people hear the word `Sharia', these are the images that spring to mind, but Islamic justice can also be used in family law, and in divorce and inheritance cases. These areas of Sharia law could be applied in certain Dutch mosques.

Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin is looking into the details of the system. In a letter to MPs, he says it is the government's duty "to ensure that no parallel society evolves where people take the law into their own hands or have an independent system of justice.

Close down mosques
An overwhelming parliamentary majority is fiercely opposed to any form of Sharia. MPs say mosques where imams dispense Sharia rulings should be closed down. Socialist Party MP Sadet Karabulut argues that "Islamic law is contrary to our own laws and regulations". "Islam often places women in an inferior position. They can, for example, be forced to have sex with their husbands. Men are allowed to be polygamous and that is against Dutch law," she explains.

Maurits Berger, Leiden University's professor of Islam in the Western world, is also against Sharia, but only where it runs contrary to Dutch law: "No stoning, child marriage or chopping off of hands."

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