Western Nations Are Ceding Sovereignty to Sharia Councils – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

In March of this year, a case in Rotherham once again forced the United Kingdom to confront a reality it has long preferred to bracket. Two men, Romulad Stefan Houphouet and Absolom Sigiyo, were convicted of repeatedly raping teenage girls over six months. This was not a tragic aberration. It was the latest chapter in Operation Stovewood, the National Crime Agency’s years-long investigation into grooming networks in Northern England — networks that thrived, in part, because local institutions feared that intervention might appear culturally insensitive.

This is how it begins — not with a firebomb or border fence, but with a whisper: a patrol route skipped, a teacher instructed to adapt, a case quietly closed. These are not failed states. These are liberal democracies surrendering jurisdiction street by street.

When Raheem Kassam published No Go Zones in 2017, critics dismissed it as a provocation. Yet the very areas Kassam named — Malmö, Molenbeek, Tower Hamlets — have since become symbols of precisely the trend he flagged: districts where parallel moral codes and informal authority structures increasingly eclipse national law.

By 2024, the UK had 85 operating Sharia councils, up from a single body in 1982. These informal tribunals issue religious rulings on marriage, divorce, and inheritance — often outside the purview of British courts. An estimated 100,000 Islamic marriages remain unregistered with the state, denying women legal protections. A 2018 government review found that some councils actively discouraged reporting domestic violence, framing abuse as a marital matter to be handled “within the faith.”

In Sweden, police designate 59 “especially vulnerable areas,”, home to more than 550,000 people. Of these, 17 are labeled “particularly vulnerable,” meaning that state actors — police, ambulance, social workers — require coordinated support just to operate. These are districts where public services are undermined by criminal networks and parallel authority structures, often tied to religious identity.

France has catalogued more than 750 zones urbaines sensibles. In some, public schools discreetly align behavior expectations with religious observance. In 2025, a school in Seine-Saint-Denis asked pupils not to eat lunch during Ramadan hours. Around the same time, a teenager in Alsace was beaten for drinking water in daylight. The incidents were neither prosecuted nor officially condemned.

According to the Migration Research Institute, Europe now has more than 900 districts where civil authority is contested. In Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, clan-based arbitration has quietly replaced legal recourse in parts of Duisburg and Essen. One 2025 case involving a violent feud between rival groups ended not in court, but through mosque-led mediation. The police were informed only afterward.

Denmark, alone among its peers, has responded with unapologetic clarity — moving to dismantle entire ethnic enclaves through zoning and relocation laws. Italy has confronted the problem less directly, but investigative reports from Milan and Brescia have documented neighborhoods where de facto Sharia norms govern day-to-day life.

Berlin’s police chief publicly warned Jewish and LGBTQ residents to avoid certain districts — remarkable not for the sentiment but for the fact it had to be said aloud.

Sharia Patrols in London

In the UK, Sharia patrols emerged a decade ago in East London, confronting passersby for drinking alcohol or holding hands. In Wuppertal, Germany, young men donned “Shariah Police” vests and patrolled streets unchallenged until public backlash forced arrests. These incidents were symbolic, but symbols matter. They signal who enforces the rules — and whose rules count.

None of this happens in a vacuum. Muslim representation in local politics continues to rise — as it should — but in some boroughs, deference to cultural leadership has become a substitute for enforcement. In Birmingham, 18 out of 120 city councillors identify as Muslim. In Tower Hamlets, a legacy of patronage politics intersects awkwardly with calls for scrutiny.

And yet, officials refuse to speak clearly. The term “no-go zone” is treated as radioactive. But euphemism doesn’t change fact: where law retreats, something else governs.

Nor is this pattern confined to Europe. In western Sydney, non-Muslims have reported harassment in districts where Islamic customs are enforced informally. In Toronto and Montreal, religious tribunals still adjudicate family matters behind closed doors. In Dearborn and Minneapolis, officials quietly navigate between civic enforcement and communal consensus.

These are not barbed-wire enclaves. They are zones of ambient sovereignty, governed not by law but by accommodation.

And the cost is not theoretical. From 2016 to 2023, over 150 honor killings were recorded across Germany, Sweden, and the UK — most victims were women accused of violating family codes. These are not fringe crimes. They grow from soil the state no longer tills.

Women bound to marriages they cannot escape. Children punished for apostasy. Jews who conceal identity. Gay teenagers who retreat from visibility. These are not abstractions. They are the casualties of sovereign hesitation.

The West is not collapsing. But it is conceding jurisdiction in places where it once presumed dominance. The vacuum is filled — not by violence, but by velocity. And by norms the state never authored.

The challenge isn’t just multiculturalism. It’s jurisdiction.

And the frontier isn’t only ideological.

It’s civic.

And national sovereignty is already receding.

In the end, this is not about fear. It is about fidelity — to a constitutional promise that law is indivisible, and that sovereignty, once shared with those who do not recognize it, becomes something else entirely. The test is not at the borders. It is within them. And the answers, now overdue, will define what the West becomes next.

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