Islamic law officially adopted in British courts

From the Times Online:

ISLAMIC law has been officially adopted in Britain, with sharia courts given powers to rule on Muslim civil cases.

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence.

Rulings issued by a network of five sharia courts are enforceable with the full power of the judicial system, through the county courts or High Court.

Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

Some might call this a natural progression of multiculturalism in a forward-thinking society. Me? I wonder why any culture would willingly shred its own institutional fabric, especially for the hollow aim of appearing politically sophisticated. Is it not possible to remain sensitive to other cultures without surrendering your own identity?

I guess you could say my negative reaction to this story is melodramatic, a mountain out of a molehill. After all, this is only relating to a small portion of Muslim civil cases and has little effect on the British legal system as a whole. Well, you may be right, or it may be the creeping decline of democratic Western civilization that I've been sensing for some time now.

While you ponder that, ponder this from Mark Steyn's great essay The future belongs to Islam:

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but -- as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the "tolerance" of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one's sympathies lie on Islam's multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you're not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn't you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

"We're the ones who will change you," the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "Our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours."

Maybe it's true: A great civilization cannot be conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.