It is estimated that there are currently around 85 sharia courts operating in Britain. They enjoy the support of a number of non-Muslim establishment figures, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who said in an interview in 2008: “There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

In terms of dealing with domestic abuse, sharia courts tend to take the side of the abuser and often tell the victims that they need to examine their own behaviour to try to find a way to stop provoking the violence. My research into sharia courts found that the clerics rarely, if ever, advise reporting the perpetrators to the police, but rather advise the men to take anger management classes and receive mentoring from so-called community elders so that marriages can be “saved”.

In 2011, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (Ikwro) found, following Freedom of Information requests to police forces across the UK, that 39 out of 52 forces had recorded a total of at least 2,823 “honour” attacks by family members on women and girls during 2010. Some forces showed an increase of nearly 50 per cent in such cases from 2009. This is the context in which hardline Muslims in the UK claim that wearing the burka is simply about freedom.

The status of Muslim women in relation to men is unlikely to improve unless Muslim women are better represented within the political system. Last month MWNUK wrote to the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn asking him to look into allegations of “systematic misogyny displayed by significant numbers of Muslim male local councillors”.

MWNUK says that female Muslims were discriminated against and blocked from seeking office by Muslim male Labour councillors operating under the patriarchal “biradari” caste system, and that the problem had been an “open secret” within Labour, which it accused of being “complicit at the highest levels”. In the letter to Corbyn, the organisation said: “Labour politicians have deliberately turned a blind eye to the treatment of Muslim women because votes have been more important to them than women’s rights.”

During my time with Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, during the 2015 election campaign, I heard from Muslim women who complained that they had been undermined, sabotaged and blocked from becoming councillors, with many selection “deals” decided behind closed doors.