- “Syria‘s rebel leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has dismissed the online controversy over videos showing him gesturing to a young woman to cover her hair before he posed for a photo with her last week. . . . ‘I did not force her. But it’s my personal freedom. I want photos taken for me the way that suits me,’ Sharaa said.”
- Experts have commented that “[t]he launch of two exchange-traded funds (ETFs) involving Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul market, the largest stock exchange in the Middle East, and the HKEX signals an investment shift between the two jurisdictions.”
- “According to a recent investigation by The Times, the number of sharia councils in the UK has surged to 85 since the first one was established in 1982.”
- “Britain‘s shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has been heavily criticised for saying that no ‘sharia courts’ should exist in the country, referring to the informal bodies issuing non-legally binding religious rulings on marriage.” For more content and context on Islamic family law in the United Kingdom, consul our “Roundtable: Islamic Family Law in the UK: Akhter v. Khan.”
- “Russia’s top Islamic authority issued a ruling that allows men to have multiple wives, the state-run news agency RIA Novosti reported Thursday, citing Moscow’s head Mufti. Mufti Ildar Alyautdinov, who serves as deputy chairman of the Ulama Council of Russia’s Spiritual Administration of Muslims, said religious polygyny would be allowed in cases when the ‘wife is unable to bear children due to her health, due to the end of her reproductive age or other objective reasons, such as the sexual incompatibility of the wife,’ but also if she ‘does not want to have children.'” Consult the Family Code of the Russian Federation, which explicitly prohibits polygamy under Article 14.