Muslim Legal Consciousness, Family Law and Everyday Lived Experience

In this paper I reflect on legal alienation and the everyday lived experience of British Muslims using civil and plural/ privatized systems of law to resolve matrimonial disputes. There is now a growing body of literature documenting the ways in which English and European family law systems accommodate diverse family arrangements with the settlement of migrant ethnic and religious communities across European countries. Migration from the global south has led to important insights into the ways in which family law systems have adapted to what is now described as the emergence of the ‘multicultural family.’ At the heart of this work lie important questions over debates on rights, choice, agency, autonomy, welfare, duties, and responsibilities. There is however an absence on insights on legal alienation of formal and personal systems law and the ways in which everyday experience of law produces ordinary legal consciousness.Drawing upon empirical research and feminist literature I raise critical questions of legal alienation, self, power, voice, authority and the production of knowledge in social and legal realities raising questions over the ways in which social, political and legal practices may marginalize minority voices, knowledge and lived legal experience. At the heart of this paper lie critical questions on the operative and constitutive effects of modern law, belonging and identity, conceptualization of the ‘centre and periphery’ and the ways in which discourses on diversity in law continue to reflect unequal power relations. What do we understand as Muslim legal consciousness? In what ways do these diverse practices in legal experience be understood as legal alienation of practices that may disrupt, transform and resist traditional conceptions of legal consciousness? The interplay of diverse, social and lived legal knowledges and plural experiences produce new insights into the experience of legal alienation in ordinary legal consciousness for British Muslims.