March 2008 
Year 14    No.129
Controversy


Shariah not OK  in the UK

The titular head of the Anglican Church talks of the need to integrate aspects of religious laws, the Shariah laws, into British law. In response, all hell breaks loose

BY JAVED ANAND

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".

 


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