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Shari’a Law and the Archbishop of Canterbury

Shari’a in the West is a collection of essays, edited by Rex Adhar and Nicholas Aroney, written by leading scholars from a range of countries, academic fields, and political and faith positions in reaction to some public lectures given by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales regarding the practice of Shari’a Law in the Western world. The excerpt below is taken from John Milbank’s essay ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury: The Man and the Theology Behind the Shari’a Lecture’ and focuses on the Muslim reaction to Dr Williams’s speech.

Over the first two weeks of February 2008 in the United Kingdom, a sizable controversy was stirred up by a lecture given to the Royal Courts of Justice by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Rowan Williams, entitled ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective’, and a prior interview which he gave to the BBC Radio 4 news programme, ‘The World at One’. In the course of both the talk and the interview, the Archbishop suggested that certain extensions of Shari’a law in Britain were both ‘unavoidable’ and also desirable from the double point of view of civil cohesion and the defence of the ‘group rights’ of religious bodies.

Public reactions to this pronouncement were both swift and overwhelmingly negative. The Prime Minister distanced himself from the remarks, declaring that there could be but one common law for all in Britain, which must be based upon ‘British values’. Most political leaders from all the main British political parties more or less followed suit. The popular press suggested that the Archbishop was clearly as mad as his hirsute appearance had always led them to suppose, while the quality press by and large accused him of extreme political naivety, obscurity, and misplaced academicism. Certain commentators at the higher end of the media spectrum dissented from the latter verdict, and allowed that Dr Williams had bravely raised issues of great future importance. They also conceded to him that some supplementary elements of the religious law of all three monotheistic traditions were already incorporated by British justice and that further extensions of this accommodation should not be ruled out.

Yet, with near unanimity they declared that he had gone too far in apparently condoning parallel legal systems with an option for people to have certain cases considered either by a civil or religious tribunal. Any such possibility was also condemned by the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the Rt Rev Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and this was discretely echoed by the majority of even the Anglican bench of bishops. It was reported that only three per cent of the members of the Synod which helps to govern the Anglican Church in England favoured the Archbishop’s opinion, while up and down the country, on the Sunday following the initial furore, priests found themselves forced in their sermons to make some sort of allusion to it, and were only received well by their congregations if they wholeheartedly confirmed their support for one common law for all people resident in England. The population at large, encouraged by some sections of the media, predictably associated the word ‘Shari’a’ with the chopping-off of hands and the punishment of raped women as fornicators—a reaction which, it seems, the Archbishop’s advisors had predicted and warned him against.

Why he went ahead with his remarks in unmodified form in the face of this advice remains something of a mystery. For, unquestionably, it weakened, if only for the short-term future, his standing in the church and in the nation. In addition, the very same African Anglicans threatening (in the summer of 2008 at the Lambeth Conference) to split the Anglican communion over the homosexual issue were further alienated from Williams: several of them operate in countries where Shari’a law is not only applied in a draconian fashion, but is also used as a weapon against the freedoms and customs of Christians. Not surprisingly, in the face of such implications, the Queen herself—who is the ultimate head of the Church of England (though not of the Anglican communion, which nonetheless informally acknowledges the primacy of the See of Canterbury)—was reported in The Times to have expressed grave concern over the impact of the row upon the standing of her Archbishop.

Muslims’ Reaction

Meanwhile, the reactions of Muslims themselves were such as must surely have left Williams feeling somewhat dismayed. Publicly articulate Muslim women were overwhelmingly hostile. Most moderate Muslims, from spokespersons to those in humble walks of life, said that the issue of Shari’a was of little relevance to them, while one or two heads of mosques—Mohammed Chisti, the Central Oxford imam, for example—declared that the Archbishop had endangered the lives of Muslims by stirring up Islamophobia. Even Tariq Ramadan, the well-known Muslim academic (whom Williams had cited in his speech), while welcoming much of it, appeared to distance himself from any endorsement of parallel jurisdictions. The Muslim Council of Great Britain did, however, offer approval while, significantly, expressing concern for Williams’ qualified support for Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester’s (truthful, if rhetorically overheated) declaration that certain Muslim-dominated areas of British cities were in effect ‘no-go areas’ for those of other cultures.

Here, on the side of both the Archbishop and the Council, one detected apparent inconsistencies which may be of some significance. On the one hand, Williams’ apparent sympathy for Islamic aspirations was conjoined to a certain fear of multicultural ghettoization of Muslims in particular. On the other hand, the Council’s attitude suggested a covert welcome for such segregation, which may call into question its ‘moderate’ standing. This standing has, in any case, been questioned before by commentators, who point out the degree to which the qualified, ‘do-not-use-violence’ support for the position of Sayeed Qutb (a crucial Egyptian theorist of modern Islamism) affects the Council’s policies and strategies.

As to the ‘moderate’ character of other Muslims who welcomed Williams’ comments, this is more than debatable. At least one cleric insisted, on television, that a Shari’a-regulated marriage law would have to accept polygamy—on the grounds that otherwise an excess of Islamic women left many of them with only the option of becoming either prostitutes or nuns (with the latter being scarcely an Islamic option). All this left Williams wide open to the charge that he had in fact encouraged Muslim extremism and only made the position of the majority of moderate Muslims in Britain more uncomfortable. Most opinion was divided only as to whether he was simply foolish or dangerously adrift from sanity in his substantive opinions. There were several calls for his resignation—a more or less unprecedented circumstance for an Archbishop of Canterbury.

After the Initial Furore

A week or so after the Shari’a lecture, the heat started somewhat to evaporate, and some commentators who took the trouble to read the original speech, wrote that they were surprised by both its subtle seriousness and relevance—even if aspects of it still seemed very ill-judged.

The latter verdict was finally endorsed by Williams himself before a session of the Synod at York—at least to the degree that he was able to do so without seriously losing face (which, most conceded, was fair enough). He confessed to ‘clumsiness’ and ‘unclarity’, and crucially denied that he had ever intended to endorse ‘parallel’ jurisdictions. Yet he proceeded to repeat positions that, in the opinion of many, remained open to such an interpretation. The concession seemed, however, to be enough to ensure a rallying-round by the British establishment in the interests of not allowing any besmirching of the dignity of Williams’ office. The Prime Minister endorsed his worth as a person and a leader, while the Synod itself offered surprisingly unqualified support—for reasons both pragmatic and sentimental.

The long-term impact of this public argument remains to be seen—it may well be very short term and limited. However, the broader concerns that Williams rightly and courageously sought to address will not go away and the various reactions to his talk themselves cast an interesting light upon those issues.

John Milbank is Professor in Religion, Politics, and Ethics and Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham.

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