AS PART of a passionate campaign to solve an apparently non-existent problem, American state legislatures have been presented, over the past decade, with at least 120 bills that sought to outlaw the practice of sharia, the Islamic legal system, and 15 of them have been enacted. With or without these laws, America’s attachment to its own constitution and judicial and legal system seems pretty robust.

Things are not quite so clear-cut on the other side of the Atlantic. Thanks to a vagary of history, there is one little patch of the European Union where sharia has hitherto held sway, not as a self-imposed code of behaviour but as a system under which Muslim citizens have been pressured to regulate their business, especially involving inheritance. That region is Western Thrace, a part of Greece adjoining the land border with Turkey. Alexis Tsipras, Greece’s leftist prime minister, is about to introduce legislation that will change that odd state of affairs.

The situation has its roots in regional history. Back in 1923, when Greece and Turkey were negotiating a massive, compulsory swap of religious minorities, it was agreed that two communities would have an exceptional right to remain where they lived: the Greek community of Istanbul (defined rather narrowly) and the Muslims of Western Thrace, a majority of whom spoke Turkish. Each community numbered around 110,000. After the vicissitudes of the past century, the Greeks of Istanbul have dwindled to a few thousand, while the Muslim population in Thrace has remained roughly level. (It would be much higher had there not been widespread emigration.)

The treaties guaranteed both communities a degree of cultural, educational and religious autonomy whose exact extent has often been disputed. But the net result has been a paradoxical one. In Turkey the newly established secular republic moved in 1926 to abolish sharia as an unwanted relic of the discredited Ottoman theocracy. A European-style law code was introduced instead. But former Ottoman subjects in Greece continued to have their family matters regulated by the mufti, just as it had been in the era of the sultans.

Just in time to avoid an embarrassing rebuke from the European Court of Human Rights, which is expected to issue a ruling next month, Mr Tsipras promised legislation that would make the practice of sharia voluntary rather than compulsory. In other words, an extended family will still be able organise its affairs on sharia principles if it wants to, but only by the freely given consent of all interested parties. In the absence of such consent, Greek civil law will have default jurisdiction.

A long legal saga involving three Muslim women from Greece has brought things to this point. Hatijah Molla Salli, a woman from the Thracian town of Kommotini who is now in her late sixties, inherited her husband’s property when he passed away nearly a decade ago. Although Muslim, he had chosen to bypass the sharia system and make a secular will, leaving his assets to her. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that huge numbers of Thracian Muslims prefer to use secular legal system if they can.)

The will was immediately disputed by the dead man’s sisters: they contended that under the norms of Islam he should have made some provision for them. Greek courts then had to determine whether a Muslim in Thrace had the right to draw up a secular testament. A lower court vindicated the widow, but the country’s highest tribunal decided otherwise: a Muslim in Greek Thrace was not merely entitled but obliged to arrange his affairs under Islamic law, as interpreted where necessary by a mufti. The widow then took her case to the ECHR in Strasbourg.

“As a European Union nation, this situation does not bestow honour on us,” said Mr Tsipras by way of explaining the impending change. Greek officials have been at pains to stress that they are not abolishing sharia, merely making it a matter of free choice. One official told an interviewer that by showing respect for Muslim customs, the Greek state had helped to ensure that the country did not become a recruiting ground for terrorism.

In many press reports, it has been asserted that Greece is the only place in Europe where sharia is practised. But that statement needs to be qualified. In Britain, dozens of sharia councils exist to adjudicate (on a voluntary basis, although there may be strong social pressures) the marital affairs of Muslim citizens. Most people who approach these councils are women seeking a religiously sanctioned divorce. And the Kremlin-backed rulers of Chechnya, which is at least geographically part of European Russia, already enforce many Muslim norms (with regard to headgear and grooming) and they have pledged to introduce a full-blown sharia regime. Europe’s peripheries are a long way from Kansas.