The growing acceptance of sharia in the UK has led to the formation of a Muslim Arbitration Tribunal in 2007 which, according to its website, was endorsed by the former President of the Supreme Court, Lord Phillips.

In 2008 Sheikh Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, spokesman for the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, defended the decision in six domestic violence cases arbitrated by a UK sharia court not to punish the alleged perpetrators or report them to the police but rather to advise the men to take anger management classes and receive mentoring from so-called community elders so that marriages could be "saved". In each case, the women were advised by the sharia court to withdraw their complaints to the police. Usually, they obey.

The voices of Muslim women who have suffered terrible consequences as a result of sharia taking root in Britain are often silenced. I spoke with a number of women who have had experience of sharia courts.

Fawzia married her husband when she was 16 years old and was divorced eight years later. The marriage was an Islamic ceremony, and her divorce was eventually granted by a sharia council four years after she first went to see her local imam. Fawzia's story, and those of numerous other women, should provide a cautionary tale of how sharia courts are gaining creeping acceptance in the UK.

Afzal, the man chosen by her parents to be Fawzia's husband, was 30 years old and had been married previously. "I had never met him," Fawzia told me when we met in Hyde Park, her chador covering her tiny frame. "When he started to hit me I thought it was me causing him to do it." What Fawzia did not know when she married Afzal was his history of violence towards women. The year before he married Fawzia, Afzal had broken his sister's wrist in an attempt to keep her from seeing her boyfriend, and then attacked his brother's mother-in-law when she intervened.

"He started hitting me when I was pregnant with my first baby," says Fawzia, who agreed to meet me through a women's counselling service, "and it never stopped."

By the time Fawzia was 20 she had three children and numerous scars from the regular beatings she endured from Afzal, but had nowhere to escape to. She went alone to see her imam, who suggested she speak to a scholar at one of the many sharia councils in London. "I told [the scholar] that I was desperately unhappy, that my children were being neglected, that I could not cope in this marriage. I admitted he hit me. I was told to be a good wife and to make my husband more happy."

Fawzia was eventually granted an Islamic divorce, which her husband contested, four years later. She had to pay £400, the standard cost for women applying for divorce. Men who apply for divorce to sharia courts are charged just £200.