Rendering unto Caesar
As so often in life, there is good news and bad news:
The good news is that Ken Livingstone's hatemongering chum Yusuf al-Qaradawi has been barred from entering the United Kingdom.
Further good news is that at long last the notorious Abu Hamza is finally being extradited to the United States on terrorism charges.
The bad news is that we are still stuck with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
For the benefit of anyone who has spent the last twenty-four hours locked in a cupboard, the leader of the Anglican Communion has expressed the view to the BBC and in a lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice that elements of Islamic Shari'a law should be incorporated into the English legal system.
Iain Dale comments:
Expect a mass walkout from the Church of England. We all know that Church of England bishops sometimes have difficulty with the concept of actually believing in God, but I never thought I would see the day when the Archbishop of Canterbury would actually advocate the implementation of another religion's so-called 'laws' in what remains a predominantly Christian country. He thinks the introduction of some sort of Sharia Law is "unavoidable". According to the BBC report Dr Williams believes we should "face up to the fact" that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system. "He argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion. For example, Muslims could choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court. He says Muslims should not have to choose between "the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty".
This is what Rowan Williams (for it is he) said on the World at One today...
There's one law for everybody... I think that's a bit of a danger...
There's a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some
aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious
law... What we don't want either, is I think, a stand-off, where the law squares
up to people's religious consciences... We don't either want a situation where,
because there's no way of legally monitoring what communities do... people do
what they like in private in such a way that that becomes another way of
intensifying oppression inside a community.
So let's get this straight. The man who leads the Church of England doesn't believe we are all equal under the law. So what next: a different law for gay people, a different law for ethnic minorities? Where on earth would it end? I'll tell you where. Anarchy.
Melanie Phillips provides an extensive analysis-cum-rebuttal of what evidently was a hopelessly confused speech by the Archbishop:
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. That means where there is a conflict between minority precepts and the law, the minority gives way. While minorities should be given the freedom to practise their religion, they must not seek to impose their own laws and customs on the majority. That is how overlapping identities can be accommodated; it is how a majority culture can acknowledge the value of other cultures without destroying itself and a nation’s identity; it is the very essence of a tolerant, decent, liberal pluralist society.
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.
But then, Dr Williams purports not to understand that this indeed the case. For he used Britain’s Jewish community to underpin his claim that there was nothing particularly untoward about multiple jurisdictions - but in the process significantly misrepresented Jewish practice to imply, entirely falsely, that British Jews aren't bound by the law of the land but get an exemption. He drew an analogy between Islamic sharia courts and Jewish religious courts. But there is an absolutely crucial difference between them.
Yes, Jewish religious courts, like sharia courts, deal with such issues as dispute arbitration, family issues, marriage and divorce. But the Jewish courts have never sought official recognition of their rulings, and these are not recognised under English law. Their dispute resolution is informal and voluntary. Their religious marriage and divorce rituals have no status in English law (with the exception of one tiny wrinkle designed to help resolve an anomaly in Jewish divorce law which causes otherwise unavoidable distress); for the state to recognise their marriages or divorces, Jews have to marry or be divorced according to English law just like everyone else. If sharia courts were to operate in this way, there would be no problem. Why should anyone care, after all, what minorities are doing in the private sphere as long as it doesn’t break the law? But the crucial difference is that such Muslims want their rulings to be accepted by the state as having the same legal authority as English law - and Dr Williams is endorsing this. But it breaks the fundamental precept that Jews have always acknowledged - that as a minority they live under the law of the land and do not seek to change it to accommodate them.
After the lecture, I challenged Dr Williams on this point, and said he was wrong to claim that the state had delegated legal authority to Jewish religious courts. Jewish religious law was not recognised by or incorporated into English law, and so I wondered why he thought that Islam alone should be able to gain special status in opposition to the legal and cultural norms of this country. He replied:
I didn’t say that Jewish law had been incorporated; I know very well that it is not. But it has established recognised practices with regard to marriage and divorce which the law doesn’t seek to override or displace. I used the analogy not to claim privileged access for Islam but to show where a parallel system of religious law was embedded in our social practice.
But in his lecture he had in fact spoken of whether there should be
"a delegation [from the law of the land] of certain functions to the religious courts of a community; and this latter question, it should be remembered, is relevant not only to Islamic law but also to areas of Orthodox Jewish practice".
On the contrary: it is not relevant to orthodox Jewish practice, because the state does not delegate any legal functions to Jewish law at all.
What Dr Williams has effectively said is that a majority culture has no right to exist and hold the ring for equal citizenship among inhabitants from different cultures:
The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural - as many political theorists have pointed out - this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.
If therefore we really don’t have the right to uphold the primacy of our own western liberal and Christian laws and traditions, the way is open for fragmentation and eventual rule by the religious culture which exercises the strongest muscle. Which is Islam.
There is much more of this, and Melanie's commentary is worth reading in full. However, in the hopeless morass in which the Archbishop has managed to lose himself, one single staggering point stands out:
An approach to law which simply said - there's one law for everybody - I think that's a bit of a danger.
"One law for everybody" is a basic tenet of the rule of law: more fundamental to a free society than democracy itself. And yet here is the leader of the Established Church denying this fundamental concept. Christianity has always recognised a distinction between the secular and the private religious realms, summarised in the saying of Jesus "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and to God that which is God's". Islam recognises no such distinction - and neither, astoundingly, does the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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