The Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the main characteristics and issues of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT). In the first paragraphs I recalled the growing need, especially for Muslims, to see some aspects of their lives regulated directly by the precepts of religious origin and the most important legal mechanisms that can allow the application of the shari’a in a Western system. Subsequently, I focused on one of these mechanisms, the religious-based arbitration, more specifically, on the MAT of the United Kingdom, which is an arbitral tribunal that applies shari’a with legal relevance in the English legal system. On the basis of this relevance I compared the MAT from the Shari’a Councils; the latter offer the Islamic community a series of services with exclusively religious and internal relevance to the community itself. In the following paragraphs I dealt with the main criticality’s of the MAT phenomenon, namely the problem of the effective voluntariness of arbitration by the weakest subjects belonging to these communities, such as women, as well as that of the possible risks, with respect to the protection of fundamental rights, the application of shari’a through arbitration, despite the existence of various controls by the judicial authority, in the executive and appeal, on compliance with the limit of public order.