Ignorance and bigotry unleashed by Williams speech

Technorati Tags: shariah, rowan+williams

Last Thursday the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave a lecture to an assembly of lawyers in London on the subject of Muslims in the UK whom, in his words, “relate to something other than the British legal system alone”. The bit which has been picked up and made into front-page news is where he says, regarding introducing a “market element” in which a citizen can choose between different systems of law, that “if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable”, which people have widely taken to mean introducing state-recognised Shari’ah tribunals. The reaction has been mostly characterised by scorn, but has also transgressed into outright hostility. (More: Yahya Birt, Ummah Pulse, MCB Press release.)

A good example of the latter was the front page of the Sun newspaper yesterday, with the headline “What a Burkha” (this pun seemed obscure even to me, but in case readers overseas haven’t heard the word ‘berk’, it means idiot) with a picture of a woman in niqab raising a two-fingered “foxtrot oscar” gesture. This picture is the same as that featured on the front of one edition of Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan, which showed three women in niqab, one of them making this gesture, quite possibly at an obnoxious hack journalist who wanted to ask them impertinent questions. Meanwhile, Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph pronounced that with Shari’ah it’s “all or nothing”. Moore brings out complete irrelevances such as the status of non-Muslims in Islamic states (dhimmis) and the apostasy law, giving the impression that he had not bothered to read the lecture. Williams was not talking about those things and stated clearly:

In a society where freedom of religion is secured by law, it is obviously impossible for any group to claim that conversion to another faith is simply disallowed or to claim the right to inflict punishment on a convert.

Moore does make a valid point, in that there are a number of competing sects in Islam and that deciding who would be the favoured interepreters of that law in any British Shari’ah court would be a problem. It is true that some members of the Deobandi or Bareilawi groupings would refuse to accept the judgements of arbitrators of the other, or of an Arab scholar without the requisite fist-length beard. However, this would most likely only be a problem if the council’s ruling is Islamically uncontroversial; it would be more of an issue if a divorce was granted to a woman when the man, or others around them, felt it was unjustified.

The suggestion that the personal aspects of Shari’ah cannot be applied without cutting off thieves’ hands or removing apostates’ heads is absurd. This is exactly what is done in many Muslim countries where the criminal law aspects of the Shari’ah were never restored after the colonial powers relinquished control. Moore might well ask why there has been no reported incidence of Muslim “hit squads” administering floggings or similar physical punishments, and few if any incidents of revenge killing (despite honour killings happening fairly frequently). The answer is that Muslims accept that Shari’ah law is not law in the UK right now. While the personal and state aspects of Shari’ah are not formally separate, the application of parts but not the whole is, and has long been, a known fact. There are rulings in the Shari’ah, such as that on whether it is permissible or not to marry an apostate (it is not), which would not exist if personal law really could not exist without an Islamic state.

While some Muslims have suggested that the Archbishop’s comments were calculated to produce a backlash against Muslims, in light of pronouncements from the likes of Michael Nazir-Ali, I disagree and believe that some state recognition of minority religious laws would be a good thing. Many people are concerned with the status women might have under such a system, but they may well also benefit, if it becomes impermissible for families to cut women out of their inheritance in defiance of Shari’ah, or if plural marriages were recognised for the purpose of inheritance law, under which, at present, only the first wife benefits if the husband dies intestate, even if the marriages were conducted abroad – it is, after all, only the second and subsequent wives, not the men, who lose out under the present system. It need not be a method of securing male control over unwilling females; in any case, what such people often need is financial support, and the state does not provide this even now.

There has been a lot of ignorance expressed in response to Dr Williams’s speech. For example, one Baroness Cox claimed on BBC Newsnight last night that Canada once had Shari’ah law, but abolished it under pressure from women’s rights groups. In fact, Ontario (not Canada as a whole) had an Arbitration Act, allowing religious tribunals to judge in some matters of personal law. Jews and other religious groups used this law, but Muslims did not; it was an attempt by Muslims to use it which provoked the “outcry”, in which a group of exiled Iranian Marxists and a tiny group of irreligious “Muslims” were heard loudly. It is useful to remember that orthodox Jewish law does not allow women a divorce without her husband’s consent, while Shari’ah allows the judge to grant it in some circumstances; Roman Catholic law achieves equality in this regard by not allowing divorce at all, yet these religions were deemed trustworthy in settling their disputes internally, while Muslims were not.

The most irksome aspect of the objections to Dr Williams’s speech, however, was the suggestion that if Muslims do not like British law, they should live somewhere else, apparently meaning their home countries, as if Britain was not their home country. The Muslim community are not guests in this country, but a long-established minority who have as much right to be here as the white population. It is unseemly that a polite suggestion, not an aggressive demand and not even from within the community, should provoke such suggestions.

While many Muslims no doubt wish Williams had kept his mouth shut to avoid attacting more hostility to the Muslim population, his basic suggestion was a positive one. We Muslims should not cringe at the mention or advocacy of Shari’ah, which is not the stereotype which has been depicted in the media over the last two days, but a sophisticated and equitable system which, even if the majority of the population here do not care for it, works well when implemented properly by people who know how. It is not, contrary to the Scum’s idiotic story, “a huge propaganda coup for extremists plotting to end centuries of the British way of life”, but a moderate move which would make the lives of a large religious minority easier and not affect anyone else’s way of life.