Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato on Thursday criticised sharia, the Islam-inspired law system, as "chauvinistic".
Speaking at a conference here on cross-cultural integration, the minister said: "Sharia is a body of rules inferred from one of the many interpretations of the Koran and alas made to weigh as the word of God, but they are words of man.
"It (sharia) is an expression of a chauvinistic culture which belongs to certain backward societies".
Sharia is often referred to as Islamic law but only a small part is irrefutably based upon the core Islamic text, the Koran.
It offers a code for living governing all elements of Muslim life, religious, political, social, domestic and private.
It is adopted by most Muslims to a greater or lesser degree as a matter of personal conscience but has also been formally instituted as law by certain Muslim states where it is enforced by the court system.
In other comments, Amato, a former premier, implied that the male-oriented, patriarchal nature of some Muslim societies was an infringement of women's universal rights.
"The man is the head of the family, the man decides on the way his children are brought up and if there is a marital disagreement, the husband decides.
"This is what certain Italian Muslims in annotations on the Koran attribute to the Koran itself. This is foolish, completely contrary to universal principles and a disgrace that they are attributed to the Koran," he said.
The minister, a former Socialist in the centre-left government of Premier Romano Prodi, went on to say that Muslim societies were not the only ones to "transform man's words into God's word".
He said that Italian family law had also been patriarchal and discriminated against women prior to a reform of 1975.
"Up until then, family law in Italy wasn't much different in its inspiration from that of the sharia," Amato concluded.
