Abstract

This essay represents the first part of a wider research on the controversial issue of the Islamic courts in England. It reconstructs the features and activities of these courts, as well as their relationships with the English legal order, thus underlying the complexity of the interactions between distinct and formally independent legal orders in multireligious and multicultural societies. In particular, it shows how these interactions may not only influence the resolution of conflicts which involve people who are subject to different legal orders, but also provoke continuous although slow changes in each of these legal orders. Moreover, it suggests that, when analyzing such a kind of phenomena, the concept of interlegality can be more useful than the more ambiguous (and somehow ideologically compromised) concept of legal pluralism.