No one doubts that Rowan Williams is a sincere, intelligent and well-meaning man. But the Archbishop of Canterbury has got it badly wrong with his call for Britain to recognise parts of Islamic law as British law.
It’s hard to work out why the leader of the world’s Anglicans chose to intervene on this topic. Surely his hands are full with the impending disintegration of the Anglicans as a worldwide communion over the homosexuality issue. Already several conservatives, including Sydney’s bishops, have indicated they will not attend the 10-yearly conference of the world’s bishops in July.
But he did so choose, as The Age reported on Saturday, sparking a hostile backlash from all sides of British politics.
Williams suggested that giving Islamic law official status in Britain would help to achieve social cohesion because some Muslims did not relate to the British legal system. On his website today, the archbishop clarifies his points, saying he does not want sharia as a parallel jurisdiction, but that there is unjustified alarm at the concept of sharia. He says he was exploring how a unitary system of laws might accommodate different religious claims.
At that level, that’s fair enough. But he still seems to miss a fundamental principle about both British (and Australian) and Islamic law.
First, British and Australian law. One of the most important distinctives about our legal system is the principle of equality before the law. The same law applies to all. One of the reasons multiculturalism in Australia is successful, I believe, is because the cultural concessions and protections it sometimes involves operate within this framework. Everyone understands and accepts it.
Second, Islamic law. Muslim scholars say it is a clear and direct requirement of sharia law that Muslims living in non-Muslim countries obey the civil laws of those countries. I believe the only specific requirement is that they continue to worship – that is, to live as Muslims – which is often easier in the West than some Muslim countries, if you are not part of the dominant ideology. That’s why Abdul Nacer Benbrika , now awaiting trial on terrorism related charges, left Algeria for Australia.
Muslims in Australia, and Britain, can live as good and devout Muslims, even if aspects of the surrounding culture can be challenging for them. Hundreds of thousands of Australians DO live as good and devout Muslims, and also as good Australians recognising and obeying Australian law.
Some commentators have drawn parallels between the archbishop’s suggestion and Jewish religious courts. Melbourne, for example, has such a court, the beth din, that can rule on religious marriage, divorce and disputes between Jews. The difference from what Williams is suggesting is this: the beth din’s decisions are not valid Australian law. Australian Jews must have their marriages and divorces recognised by the state. Muslims too, can have Muslim marriages celebrated by an imam, whose legal right to do so is conferred by the state.
Of course Williams is not advocating the adoption of the entire sharia law, with the criminal code practised in a few Muslim countries including stoning adulterers and amputating the hards of thieves. Nor is he advocating applying sharia in contexts involving non-Muslims. That is always a problem because sharia deliberately and explicitly discriminates in favour of Muslims.
In Egypt, for example, a judge last week ignored the apparent guarantee of religious freedom in the Egyptian constitution to rule that a Muslim was not allowed to convert to Christianity. He ruled, based on sharia, that it was lawful only to convert to Islam, not another religion, because Islam is the final and most complete religion, and to leave it for an earlier religion would insult the great religion. Converts from Islam reportedly face legal barriers, harassment and even torture by the security police for “insulting religion”.
English columnist Melanie Phillips put the no-sharia case particularly strongly in the Spectator on Friday. She noted that the European Court of Human Rights has found that sharia is not compatible with democracy, and that Williams himself has called its principles pre-modern and oppressive, making it odd for him to argue that Britain should give (aspects of) it equal status to English law.
“Either way, his proposal would also mean that Britain would simply abandon its female Muslim citizens whose parlous position in respect of forced marriages, honour killings and all the other horrors that follow from their second-class religious status would be institutionalised by giving sharia law official recognition.” Phillips wrote.
“Dr Williams says such women should still retain the right of appeal to the English courts if their human rights were breached under sharia. What absurdity is this? It is the cultural assumptions which flow from sharia which lead to the oppression of Muslim women. How is the right of appeal to human rights law going to help women who are beaten and killed by men who do it in the name of religion? In order to protect our female Muslim citizens, we need to remove from them the yoke of sharia law, not institutionalise it with the seal of official approval.”
She also wrote: “The yet more fundamental question is why he thinks we need to find any accommodation with sharia at all. He said there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes. Well no, actually there isn’t any uncertainty at all. The rules of our society have always been entirely clear: one law for all. The only challenge to that has come from those Muslims who want to destroy that foundational precept and along with it British culture and western society.
“And now the head of the Anglican church has joined them in wanting to tear up the rules governing the position of minorities which have been perfectly clear ever since the Enlightenment. These rules hold that religious minorities can practise their faith and religious precepts but under the over-arching umbrella of the law of the land. . . . Every minority until now has lived perfectly happily under that formulation. What we are now facing is a push by certain British Muslims, backed up by Islamist violence and intimidation, to change the rules of the national cultural game. There is only one proper response to that: to say that not one inch of leeway will be given to sharia law, that British society will not dilute the legal principles which govern all its citizens, and that Muslims must observe the same rules that govern every other minority in this country.”
Australian Muslims are not pushing for a dual legal system here, though some have sought limited religious courts like the beth din. One of the problems would be whose sharia law? There are four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Wahhabis are different again, as are the Shias.
According to Anisa Buckley, a PhD student at Melbourne University who is researching how Muslim women in Australia interact with religious authorities, the pressure to introduce sharia generally comes from first generation immigrant Muslim men who are self-appointed community representatives. The most vocal opposition tends to come from Muslim women who are well-established in their new country. She says they often don’t know how laws in many Muslim countries are being amended to protect women. In short, there can be misunderstandings on both sides. So what’s new?
What do you think? Has the response been alarmist and unfair – or perhaps not alarmed enough. Is the backlash largely Islamophobic? What are the most important issues at stake? After all, we allow for individual conscience in opposition to the law in some circumstances, such as conscientious objectors during war. Would sharia courts simply be a variant of that or would they undermine Australian/British law?
NB: For a thoughtful and interesting discussion, have a look at what Melbourne Anglican theologian and historian Andrew McGowan has to say (below).
Posted by Barney Zwartz
February 11, 2008 1:56 PM
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Much ado about Sharia
Andrew McGowan
Last Thursday, the day after the Christian penitential season of Lent began, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, took up his cross in a new and unforeseen way.
Just when many thought his greatest challenge and burden in the first part of 2008 was the fragmentation besetting the world-wide Anglican Communion, a firestorm has erupted in Britain itself over his comments in a lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice and a related BBC interview concerning possible application of Sharia, the Muslim legal tradition.
The reactions of the British press and public to his reflections have pushed gay American bishops and strident African fundamentalists well onto the backburner.
The most interesting and worrisome thing about this new controversy is not the content of Dr Williams’ lecture, or even the broader issue of Islamic law in Britain, but the violence of the reaction.
Outpourings of horror and derision have come from thousands of people who have no idea what he actually suggested, and hundreds who think they do but have responded to his assumed views without meaningful reference to his actual words.
The Archbishop hit a nerve that has sent a whole section of British society into paroxysms not so much about what he said, as about what they fear.
The proposals Dr Williams made were actually quite unremarkable, consisting of some gentle, and fairly incidental, glances at the emerging but far from complete accommodation in Britain of aspects of Sharia related to issues such as marriage.
His real concern in the lecture was to ask more fundamental questions about the relationship between the practices and identities of faith communities – including the Christian Church – and the fundamentals of civil law in a pluralistic society.
The Archbishop’s thoughts were as much a description of existing and emerging legal practice as a call for change.
There are many examples in the UK, and for that matter here in Australia, where forms of consultation rooted in particular traditions and communities are treated as viable and valuable supplements to conventional legal proceedings and practices.
In the UK, a Beit Din or Jewish Court has long been able to exercise jurisdiction for certain cases between Orthodox Jews, often to do with marriage and divorce. In Australia, the closest analogy might be the uses of traditional law in certain Aboriginal communities.
There are less charged examples, such as agreed conciliation processes, or local experiments with community conferences for young offenders. All these cases presume a particular set of understandings shared by participants, and all have their relationship to the law as a whole defined.
We might be properly concerned about how such subsystems dovetail with the wider application of civil law, and about maintaining the values or opportunities that have to prevail in a free society. Dr Williams himself was more than clear, stating adamantly that no Islamic (or other) system working as an adjunct to the civil law could be allowed to disadvantage women, for instance, on the basis of custom or culture:
‘No “supplementary” jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights.’
Yet the public commentary since last Thursday has assumed or asserted that the Archbishop said or implied something quite different: some speak as though he called for a whole code of Islamic law to be implemented, including the worst excesses of the Taliban; others, that he envisaged British Courts themselves administering Sharia instead of British law. These and various other accusations since levelled at him are quite untrue.
Why, when all this is so important for Britain, does a serious and nuanced voice raised in the debate find itself caricatured and howled down?
The deep-seated fear of Islam in many parts of the UK seems to have become debilitating to public discourse. Now the capacity of leading figures in British society to engage critically and seriously with the challenge is in question.
Dr Williams has set an example as important as it is forlorn. Few in Britain seem to have felt any desire, let alone responsibility, for directing the public to the issues which affect marginal Muslim and fearful secularist or Christian alike, or even to the real words of Rowan Williams.
Politicians have dived for cover. Journalistic commentators have mouthed pompously about him as ‘bonkers’ or ‘reckless’, wondering loudly about the Archbishop’s judgement and common sense in sparking such a fire, all the while fanning it vigorously themselves.
Of course legal or quasi-legal processes linked to religious and/or ethnic communities are particularly sensitive – but this is why they have to be discussed openly by community leaders. Muffling the debate under hoots and howls is a recipe for disaster.
The fear and ignorance abroad about Islam in particular simply cannot be presented as part of a political or social landscape that a canny ecclesiastical bureaucrat will avoid. It must be named and faced, and changed.
If there is hope to be gleaned from this sorry state of affairs, it will be through some few who persist in telling the truth.
Dr Williams was right to raise the issue, whether he is right about the particulars of accommodating Sharia in Britain or not.
Such a debate as he foreshadowed, but which has been shouted down for the moment, is necessary not only for a serious engagement with Islam and its adherents in Western societies, but for West’s creative response to the subtler question of how our secularism and our religious traditions can coexist.
Discussion
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