Islamic Sharia Council subservient to the English law." In an April 2013 report, the BBC's "Panorama" asked whether the Islamic Sharia Council was "failing vulnerable women and mothers" by requiring women seeking divorce to give back their marriage dowry (or "mahr"). The question of "khula" divorce often turns on the dower: if the woman is seeking the divorce, she has to return the dower to the man, or else the divorce cannot proceed. Since in traditional Islamic society, men are traditionally the bank account holders and women are traditionally homemakers, the woman has no purchase, and cannot obtain a loan in order to
Sharia be put to death, enslaved or be ransomed. Yet other scholars suggest that sharia has become a product of human interpretation and inevitably leads to disagreements about the “precise contents of the Shari'a." In the end, then, what is being applied is not sharia, but what a particular group of clerics and government decide is sharia. It is these differing interpretations of sharia that explain why many Muslim-majority countries have laws that restrict and criminalize apostasy, proselytism and their citizens' freedom of conscience and religion. Homosexual intercourse is illegal in sharia law, though the prescribed penalties differ from one school