ABSTRACT
The question which is central to this chapter is whether Islamic religious law may be or should be or must never be recognised by the European states and accommodated within the domestic legal systems. The Cairo Declaration may not have great practical resonance in strictly legal terms, but it gives, without a doubt, an insight to the Islamic approach to the idea of human rights as compared with the Western tradition. In this chapter, the author outlines and appraises three main paths by which Sharia is paving its way to the European legal space: open endorsement, recognising or tolerating extra-legal religious adjudication, and accommodating Muslim identity claims. While constitutional endorsement of Islam is not encountered anywhere in the European legal space, it needs to be noted that all the three Muslim-majority countries, which also happen to be members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, are signatories to the Cairo Declaration.
