Spare a thought for the Most Reverend Rowan Williams, head
of the worldwide 77 million strong Anglican Church. At a lecture delivered
at the prestigious Royal Courts of Justice in London in the first week of
February, he made a nuanced thought-provoking proposition that it is wrong
for secular states to treat law as their exclusive monopoly. He argued
against banishing religion to the realm of the private and made a strong
plea for the need to re-examine the relationship between law and faith,
all faiths. The absence of such an exercise forces religious minorities
into a ghettoised existence, he said.
Had Rowan Williams limited his talk to generalities, it is
quite possible that the mass media would have ignored reporting on such an
"abstract" topic altogether. But Williams chose the Shariah law to make
his point, ending up with the suggestion that Britain should consider
integrating some aspects of the Shariah law into the law of the land. He
pointed out that such optional space already exists within British
law for Jews and Christians so there is no justification for denying the
same to Muslims.
The big problem is that Williams was talking about Shariah
as it should be understood and not Shariah as it is
understood by an overwhelming majority of Muslims across the globe.
Shariah today has become synonymous with medieval morality and penal codes
that are abhorrent to modern-day sensibilities; it is because of this
ground reality that Shariah has become a dreaded word not only for others
but for a large number of Muslims as well. So instead of prompting healthy
discourse and debate, Williams’ well-intentioned words opened the
floodgates of fury and hysteria. Such was the almost instant barrage of
widespread condemnation that the speechless archbishop found himself in a
"state of shock" and "completely overwhelmed".
The archbishop’s office tried hard to clarify, "The
archbishop made no proposals for Shariah and certainly did not call for
its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law."
But even fellow bishops believed that this was exactly what their
spiritual head was suggesting.
Everyone is, of course, entitled to disagree, strongly or
otherwise, with Williams’ prescription for a multicultural,
multi-religious democracy. But the ferocity of the responses says
something not only about the archbishop’s unmindfulness of the sentiment
on the ground but also about the extent of Islamophobia in evidence today
– in the mass media and in the wider society.
Most of the time it is secularists who are at the
receiving end of the religious or ostensibly religious thought police.
This time the victim is a sober, scholarly and high-ranking theologian who
has effectively been gagged through a tsunami of words. Rowan Williams too
has a right to be heard. His lecture is therefore reproduced in full
alongside this piece. We believe that even if they disagree with his views
our readers will find in his words some food for thought.
Meanwhile, we reproduce below some examples of the tirade
against the archbishop. The fiercest attacks came from UK’s sensationalist
tabloids and well-known Islamophobic quarters, which jumped at this
archbishop-given opportunity to go hysterical. An editorial in The Sun
called Williams "a dangerous threat to our nation", adding that "Muslim
terrorists would see his foolish ramblings as a sign that our resolve
against extremism is weakening".
The website jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch, a good example of
Islamophobes in cyberspace, has been flooded with the choicest barbs and
jibes. "Equality under the law is now discrimination. This is George
Orwell’s birthplace, after all," wrote one commentator. Another said, "I
think the chances this man (Williams) has taken a secret shahaadah
(Muslim declaration of faith) are about 100 per cent – and somebody in
authority over there ought to go ahead and ASK him about that. And why
doesn’t the Prince of Wales, who is head of the Church of England (right,
Brits???), either hose this idiot down or get rid of him altogether?"
Not to be left behind was Christopher Hitchens, the
outspoken atheist and antitheist author of the recent best-seller, God
is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. For Hitchens,
religions, all religions, are the primary cause of most miseries in
the world. In his response headlined, "To Hell With the Archbishop of
Canterbury", Hitchens fumed, "Just look at how casually this sheep-faced
English cleric so casually throws away the work of centuries of
civilisation."
A former Marxist, his is an influential voice advancing
prima facie a very potent argument. "The plain statement, ‘There’s one law
for everybody and that’s all there is to be said’, still stands out like a
diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply
and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody… For the
women who are the principal prey of the Shariah system, it
is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true
miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous
cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and
irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than
none at all."
Politicians across the board were also quick to condemn
the cleric’s remarks. Above all, the archbishop found little support from
within the Anglican Church. George Carey, Williams’ predecessor,
criticised his comments on Shariah law and said that accepting the Islamic
code would be a disaster for Britain. Other leading bishops publicly
contradicted Rowan Williams’ purported call for Islamic law to be brought
into the British legal system. The most stringent attack came from the
Pakistan-born bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali.
He said it would be "simply impossible" to bring Shariah law into British
law "without fundamentally affecting its integrity".
An Associated Press news report stated, "One member of the
church’s ‘cabinet’, the archbishop’s council, was reported as saying:
‘There have been a lot of calls for him to resign. I don’t suppose he will
take any notice but yes, he should resign’."
The Muslim Council of Britain, which welcomed Williams’
"thoughtful" ideas, was among the few supportive voices. The extremist
Muslim outfit Hizb ut-Tahrir, which wants Muslim rule re-established
across the globe, started a signature campaign among Britain’s Muslims in
support of the archbishop. But support from such a virulent quarter can
only damage the archbishop’s case further. Many Muslim organisations and
intellectuals were quick to distance themselves from his views.
Shahid Malik, Labour MP for Dewsbury said, "I haven’t
experienced any clamour or fervent desire for Shariah law in this country.
If there are people who prefer Shariah law there are always countries
where they could go and live." Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham,
Perry Barr, rejected the idea that British law forces Muslims to choose
between their religion and their society. He said, "This will alienate
people from other communities because they will think it is what Muslims
want – and it is not."
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, among the few non-white columnists
writing for a main-line British newspaper, did not mince words either. In
her weekly column in The Independent titled "What he wishes on us
is an abomination" she said:
"What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination and
I write here as a modern Muslim woman. He lectures the nation on the
benefits of Shariah law – made by bearded men for men – and wants the
alternative legal system to be accommodated within our democracy in the
spirit of inclusion and cohesion.
"Pray tell me sir, how do separate and impenetrable courts
and schools and extreme female segregation promote commonalities and deep
bonds between citizens of these small isles?
"What he did on Thursday was to convince other Britons,
white, black and brown, that Muslims want not equality but exceptionalism
and their own domains. Enlightened British Muslims quail. Friends like
this churchman do us more harm than our many enemies. He passes round what
he believes to be the benign libation of tolerance. It is laced with
arsenic."
In her article, Alibhai-Brown quotes a theologian and
fellow trustee of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, Taj Hargey, who
runs the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford, "Shariah is nothing but a
human concoction of medieval religious opinion, largely archaic and
outmoded and irrelevant to life today. Most Shariah contradicts the letter
and spirit of the Koran, distorts the transcendental text." Both Alibhai-Brown
and Hargey are most disturbed about the fact that the archbishop’s remarks
will strengthen "a perilous Islamic conservatism already too powerful in
Britain".
"The reaction has escalated into hysteria," said Catherine
Heseltine, a spokeswoman of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK.
"People hear the word Shariah and have an emotive conjuring of Taliban
beheadings. It’s seen as threatening Muslim outsiders coming in and
imposing something on Britain." In reality, she said, the changes Williams
is advocating actually aren’t a high priority to British Muslims. For most
Muslims here, she said, Shariah law deals primarily with questions of how
halal meat should be prepared and how marriages should be conducted.
The sober responses to Williams’ views, far fewer in
number, have been mainly from "faith fellows" who like him are also
unhappy with "the increasingly authoritarian and anti-religious nature of
the modern liberal state".
"Williams’ legitimate religious concerns with freedom of
conscience tie in with wider western worries about the consequences of
failing to integrate a growing, devout and alienated Islamic minority
within a relativistic and increasingly aggressive secular culture," wrote
two theologians, Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst, in a joint article
published by the International Herald Tribune. But like author and
cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar, they too fear that Williams’ recipe
contains the danger of collapsing back into the failed multiculturist idea
of communities sharing the same space but leading separate lives. And that
will effectively mean abandoning the principles of gender equality and
discrimination against homosexuals.
Williams obviously has a problem convincing even "faith
fellows" that he has a real solution to offer. But at least they agree
there is a serious problem – "integration of a growing, devout and
alienated Islamic minority within a relativistic and increasingly
aggressive secular culture" – that needs addressing. And they are not
looking to "hose this idiot down" or to "get rid of him altogether".