In October 2010, the president of the UK Islamic Sharia Council, Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, stated that rape within marriage is "impossible". Yet in 1991, after decades of campaigning by feminists, the marital exemption from rape was outlawed by the House of Lords, upholding a decision by the Appeal Court. Are we seeing an erosion of all that has been gained by women fighting against patriarchal attitudes, merely in order to appease religious zealots?

But while the Solicitors' Regulatory Authority has withdrawn its endorsement of the Law Society guidance, it remains on the LS website. The LS has ignored the protests from feminists and other human rights campaigner and instead embarked on a robust promotion of sharia, using supporters such as legal academic Maleiha Malik, solicitor Aina Khan and the Oxford-based Islamist Tariq Ramadan. SBS and OLfA have been joined by Gita Sahgal, director of the Centre for Secular Space, and Chris Moos, secretary of the London School of Economics student union Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, in continuing to campaign against the acceptance of sharia. As Maryam Namazie says: "There is no place for sharia in Britain's legal system just as there is no place for it anywhere. Sharia is based on a dogmatic and regressive philosophy and a warped understanding of the concepts of equality and justice. The Law Society must immediately withdraw its shameful guidance."

In the words of one woman, interviewed for the Equal and Free? report, "‘I'm speaking as a British Muslim — I would like to say that I feel terribly let down by the British state, with its schizophrenic response to the law, its own law, its abrogation of its responsibility to safeguard the rights of Muslim women."