No right-thinking person could be anything but outraged at the decision by a Doha judge to grant custody of 10-year-old Adam Jones to his elderly Qatari grandmother, instead of returning him to the mother who has nurtured him since birth.

That he has also apparently refused Rebecca Jones even the right to see her own child rubs salt into the wound inflicted on a decent, caring family.

It is impossible to understand how a court could allow a custody suit to go ahead while ignoring the fact that Adam was taken from his mother by trickery, after she was duped into taking him from Bahrain to Doha to visit his supposedly sick grandmother.

That the judge did not at least order that Adam be produced in court, if only to establish his well-being, is inexplicable.

To have denied his mother the right to even see him under the supervision of the court, to tell him she loves him and to explain that she had not willingly given him up, is inhuman.

Who knows what condition Adam is in, what his emotional state may be, what lies he may be being fed to poison him against the mother from whom he was allegedly snatched - or even where he is.

These are all questions the judge should have been demanding answers to.

But outrage will not help Mrs Jones in what will now be a protracted fight.

She will need legal, diplomatic, financial and moral support, along with constant pressure from the media to keep Adam's plight in the limelight.

But legally there is little hope, since what many non-Muslim women forget, or do not think about in the first place, is that when they marry a Muslim man, they and their children become subject to the Islamic Sharia law should that marriage hit the rocks.

Many such marriages work, but when they go wrong, the divorce, alimony and custody laws we are used to in the Western world do not apply here.

Adam holds British and Qatari passports and, since he was the son of a Muslim man he is, in the eyes of the law here, a Muslim child.

His father may be dead, but once the Qatari side of the family decided to seek custody, the result in an Islamic court was almost a forgone conclusion, regardless of allegations that they were only able to seek that custody after illegally snatching Adam from his mother.

The judge's first priority will have been to apply Islamic law and the agony of Adam or his mother will have held little sway.

I cannot predict the long-term result, but it does not look good and I can only hope that in the meantime the British government and its representatives will at least pressure Qatari authorities to ensure access to Adam, if only to establish his safety, since he is a British passport holder. lhorton@gdn.com.bh