Canterbury Tales
You might have read the headlines concerning the Archbishop of Canterbury over the last week or so. Basically, they all pretty much read “Archbishop of Canterbury says Sharia law is unavoidable in the UK”.
This upset a few people, some of whom (like myself), would like to ensure that the legal framework of the UK is grounded on secular/ humanist grounds (whilst respecting the right to belief). This also upset a few people who foolishly had been under the impression that the Archbishop of Canterbury was supposed to be promoting Christianity. And it also upset a few people who have suggested that by the time you get to being Archbishop, you ought to have a reasonable idea which words the media are going to pick out of your interview, and that he really ought to have known better.
But one of the things I was very aware of was that I’d not actually read the interview; only the carefully selected pieces from it picked up by the media. So that was my first port of call.
Well, to be honest, that was my third port of call.
The Goldfish was my first port of call because as per usual she’s written an interesting and thought-provoking piece called Advice to an Archbishop. So I’d suggest that’s a reasonable starting point.
My second part of call was Wikipedia to try and find out a little bit more about Sharia because in the media in this country, references to Sharia only tend to pick out the ones that jar considerably with our culture:
Last year, a teenage single mother was given 100 lashes for adultery, even though she argued she was raped by three men. The court said Bariya Ibrahim Magazu could not prove that the men forced her to have sex.The Guardian
A judiciary spokesman [from Iran], Alireza Jamshidi, told reporters on Tuesday … the 20 additional executions were for such things as “rape, insulting religious sanctities and laws, and homosexuality.” Most executions in Iran are hangings, often in public and at the scenes of the alleged crimes.International Herald & Tribune
These are not laws that we in the West find comfortable: I find the notion that someone could be given 100 lashes for being raped or being executed for being homosexual morally abhorrent. I cannot, would not, and will not ever stand for this being introduced as law in the UK.
But let’s think about this seriously. Does anyone seriously think that’s what Dr. Rowan Williams wanted to introduce, or thought was inevitable?
Of course not.
In fact, anyone who actually read the interview would have noticed this for themselves:
… nobody in their right mind I think would want to see in this country a kind of inhumanity that sometimes appears to be associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well.Dr Rowan Williams
Indeed, he goes on to point out that there are other religious courts in this country in which matters are decided:
it’s not something that’s absolutely peculiar to Islam. We have orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country legally and in a regulated way because there are modes of dispute resolution and customary provisions which apply there in the light of Talmud.Dr Rowan Williams [2]
And, as the BBC point out, this is all perfectly legal now, it’s not like he’s suggesting any sort of change:
People may legally devise their own way to settle a dispute in front of an agreed third party as long as both sides agree to the process.BBC News
So what’s the problem?
The problem is two-fold. Firstly, the absolute shitstorm kicked up by the media and people with axes to grind have turned this — as per bloody usual — into another “Islam versus the West” debate when Rowan Williams was actually trying to put forward an educated and reasoned view about introducing religious law in a secular society. The impression given is that Sharia law should be codified alongside existing law as an equivalent position: however Dr Williams says he “certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law”.
The problem is that people have not responded to the reasoned view put forward by Dr. Williams; people have responded to the emotive quotes that have been taken out of context and splashed all over the press. I would say that someone in Dr Williams’ position ought to know better, and ought to know if he’s saying anything someone is going to try and take it out of context in order to try to spin their own private agenda.
But the other side of that is that I don’t really enjoy living in mob-rule society; the land of knee-jerk reactions. We live in a world artificially presented as black and white when it is populated by a kaleidoscope of colours. I was about ten years old when I first realised that MPs with different political beliefs to my own weren’t inherently evil, just people with a different opinion.
And that’s the problem in this country. We aren’t allowed to have reasoned debates about religion, about immigration, about law and order, about whether we should consider revising our approach to drug use amongst young adults, because any time anyone brings up an opinion outside the “allowed scope”, it’s shouted down. It’s not Dr Rowan Williams we should be railing against; it’s the media who dumb down the issues of the day to the extent it’s “goodies” (whatever the proprietor believes) and “baddies” (everyone else).
And we lap it up. That makes me sick.
Sharia law? I don’t know. We’ve not had the opportunity to debate it properly yet…
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