Supreme Court slams Shariat Courts, says fatwas are 'illegal'

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday said the Shariat courts have no rights to impose their orders, as it disapproved any legal status to the parallel system run by Muslim clerics to sort out disputes within the community on personal law. While these religious courts or their fatwas were not per se illegal, any attempt to implement the orders through coercive means would be illegal, said a bench comprising Justices CK Prasad and Pinaki Chandra Ghose.

A fatwa is only an opinion an expert is expected to give, it said. The top court was acting on a public interest litigation filed by a lawyer, Vishwa Lochan Madan, who cited a 2005 fatwa that annulled the marriage of a 28-year-old mother of five in Uttar Pradesh and ordered her to stay with her father-in-law who had allegedly raped her.

“The power to adjudicate must flow from a validly made law. Person deriving benefit from the adjudication must have the right to enforce it… These are the fundamentals of any legal judicial system,” the court said. “… decisions of the dar-ul-qaza (Shariat courts) or fatwa do not satisfy any of these requirements.”

It is an informal justice delivery system with an objective of bringing about amicable settlement between parties, it said. “It is within the discretion of the persons either to accept, ignore or reject it.”

The court issued a word of caution for such courts as fatwas get “strength from the religion” and have the potential of causing “serious psychological impact on the person intending not to abide by it”.




The two-judge bench dubbed the UP incident cited by the lawyer as an eye-opener on fatwas. Referring to the incident, where the fatwa was issued after a journalist asked for a Shariat court’s opinion, SC said religious courts should not issue fatwas at the instance of strangers. But it also said no one should object to issue of fatwas as long as they do not infringe upon the rights of individuals.