No worries.
Caveat: I'm no expert on either "Sharia law" or the UK system other than the UK is common law like us and the basic concepts are the same. I also did some reading of what I think are unbiased sources on the "Sharia law" issue in the UK.
As is the case with most things Muslim these days, there are a few things that are spooky and a lot of things that are being overblown.
First a quick primer on our (the US and UK) legal systems. We of course have the courts to decide civil disputes. But, for many years, both countries have arbitration rules -- the Federal Arbitration Act and the state analogues in the US and the Arbitration Act in the UK -- that recognize the ability of parties to a dispute to agree to have it resolved via "arbitration" and also allow them to devise basically any private means of resolving that dispute that they want.
Then, both systems allow the winner in that private dispute resolution to have the decision enforced by the standard civil common law courts.
In other words, if I agree with Bob to arbitrate in the US using say the law of Berzerkerstan, I can do that. If I win, I can then go to a US court and have that court enforce the award.
Now, in the US anway, the court is allowed to look into the arbitration proceeding in very limited ways to ensure that there is basic fairness involved, and that neither party was compelled against their wishes to arbitrate using the rules that were actually employed.
As I understand it, the same is true in the UK.
So what is happening in the UK is not a "new" concept and is, in my view, being blown out of porportion. The UK is not adopting a "separate" law system in parallel that uses Sharia law.
Instead, what I have read is that the UK courts have said they will agree to respect private arbitration decisions based on Sharia law involving family, domestic and some other civil matters, and they will enforce those awards. This is again
no different for our existing system that allows you to decide, privately, with another party the "rules" that will be used to decide your dispute.
So, if two Muslims (or two Christians for that matter) decide that they want their dispute decided by Sharia law and arbitrated privately, the UK courts (and the US courts as well) have generally agreed to enforce any decision rendered in that arbitration.
Now, where there needs to be oversight is in ensuring, for example, that women in the UK are not compelled to arbitrate in a system that doesn't say respect their right own property. Or uses fundamentally unfair means of deciding disputes (does it weigh more than a duck? a witch!).
But it is not as if the UK is "adopting" Sharia law or forcing anyone to be subject to it. The UK is just doing what it and the US have done for many years: respecting the right of two individuals to create their own rules for resolving a dispute.
Jeff, I realize that your practice is business litigation and construction litigation, what is you take on Sharia Law as a separate law system in the UK. This is not argumentative, just your opinion. It seems like two separate law systems could create a problem.