No Sharia law in my backyard, German state says

From our Keep-this subject-in-the-slow-news-day folder series.

Google and whoever else may have access to the drafts folder of the K-Landnews blog knows we have kept this topic there for about a year.

Stateside, the subject has been in and out of the news for years under the "no Sharia law for us" heading or the moderately less inciting "Islamic law" header.

In Germany, the worriers have been careful in their choice of words, so they call it "a parallel justice system". It means more or less the same: A minority ethnic group in a country tries to handle disputes and potential legal issues among themselves, without going to the authorities.

The arguments in Germany match those in other nations:

That's a huge problem!

It undermines our justice system by setting up a parallel system outside of democratic control.

When asked for specifics, the worriers have little to substantiate their claims. Maybe a marriage dispute here, a bar fight there. Oh, wait muslims tend to not have many bar fights among themselves. So, a fight without hospital worthy injuries, then.
Accounts of what happens when the community handles these among itself strongly suggest the term "mediation" to be much more appropriate than "parallel justice system", but we leave that out as too much of a distraction to the readers.

That's all you need for a slow news day when you are out of topics because somebody else ran the "undetected monster asteroids can strike Earth at any moment" story last week.

The German state mentioned in the title is Bavaria, a state that has been doing well both economically and politically. With nice people and the Oktoberfest.
And a state with a strong Christian, largely Catholic tradition. Which brings us to Canon Law, or church law for people like us unfamiliar with the difference between canon and cannon.

Wikipedia says Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox "church law is legislated, interpreted and [...] adjudicated". But we have had almost 2000 years to get used to this one, so it is not parallel, right.

The rules and "courts" of sports associations are not parallel either, after all, marriage disputes are not a sport, neither are fist fights (unless regulated by wrestling or boxing bodies).

But thanks to pesky web site reader comments, we know of Western customs of yore that fit the "parallel" system very nicely. As one reader in one online publication pointed out: we were members of the German ethnic minority in the Balkans, and we would handle disputes among ourselves as much as we could because we did not trust the Serbian authorities. [Sorry about the missing attribution, we should have updated that draft regularly!]

If this is too anecdotal, you won't have to search in Western literature for long to find funny [Italian] or terrifying [everybody else] stories along those lines.

Times change, don't they?