The Archbishop’s bomb
I believe the Archbishop has done something enormously courageous, perhaps without realizing it. He’s dropped a bomb on multi-culturalism.
With his huge, dense speech on the shariah at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday night, he has woken the country from its self-delusion. There have been whole university departments devoted to what’s called ‘comparative law’ in UK for twenty years at least, and a huge amount published on it – but no one pays attention to religion. It’s because of secularization that the ABC’s speech has come as such a shock.
He is right that there is a system of parallel or plural legal systems already operative in UK - and not just Muslim. All religions develop legal systems, though they all operate differently and to different ends. Now we can no longer ignore the cherished secular myth of uniformity. So what do we do now? Do we ignore the fact as we have done for so long? A cult of silence has been in operation for thirty years, to use SOAS Law Professor Werner Menski’s potent phrase. Purposive non-discourse, he once said memorably, has been government policy a generation. It’s what’s allowed all kinds of human rights abuses to get rooted. And it has also allowed the rest of the country to operate a kind of silent apartheid, a pretence that minority cultures would have no impact on the rest of us.
What do those who have reacted in such high dudgeon to the Archbishop think should be done about informal shariah? What world are they living in? Go on ignoring it? Hardly. Ban it ? Surely not! If you do that, you ban Muslims! To be Muslim is to follow some form of the shariah. So what’s left is to incorporate it – and so achieve a certain right to regulate its excesses, although the ABC did not quite put it that way. What he said was:
The role of ’secular’ law is not the dissolution of [religious loyalties] in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress.
What the ABC is advocating is that secular positive law should recognize its own humanity in roots that are also religious – in this case Christian – and stop pretending it has the right to be so prescriptive, abolutising and uniform. And anti-religious. The famous ‘neutrality’ for which the law strives is more often a denial of difference than an affirmation of mercy and justice.
It was a brilliant, if sometimes opaque lecture – and a PR catastrophe. Given the context of a cult of silence, the Archbishop probably would have done better not to accept this invitation, and thereby appear out of the blue to be suddenly sanctioning the shariah law. It’s the last straw for many professional archbishop bashers. Given the way the lectures have been pitched it was a trap – and he’s walked right into it.
But there will be no ignoring the reality of migration any more.
February 8th, 2008 at 08:07 pm
The penultimate paragraph of your blog seems an ideal and, on the face of it, plausible aspiration.
To achieve it, I appreciate Trevor Phillips’ call for a wider and appropriate spread of cultrually diverse input into the forming of British law.
I still say Muslims are warmly welcome to live in Britain with the proviso they embrace the law of the land (along with every other ethnic and religious group).
When Christians, and other non-Muslims, have similar rights in the Muslim world, we can revisit this issue with more credibility.
February 8th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
<p>[…] Read here […]</p>
February 9th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I do not believe that the Archbishop was naive to accept the invitation or give the lecture. If the ABC - and we - do not attempt to keep the level of public debate up, it will sink, and there is no bottom. In the long run freedoms can be forfeited altogether. What turns it from a ‘disaster’ to success is entirely the response to the Church to it (and indeed of Jewish, muslim, legal and other communities). If we stand behing him, the media will back off, and if we do this enough, perhaps government will recover a little of its nerve about ideas, and the real possibility of civil society
The press headline was ‘Archbishop says Sharia ‘inevitable’’ is what we expect from our press. They consider the Church easy meat, as indeed it is as long as we have no basic ecclesiology. It would be a pity if Christians around the world were unable to read our headlines of our media without any critical hermeneutic. When see the media stoning a Christian, you conclude that he must have done something wrong? Did you learn nothing from Regensburg?
My Archbishop said that more formal recognition of the range of jurisdictions is ‘unavoidable’. Because there is a range of jurisdictions, so for example, two participants to a dispute are sometimes able to choose which tribunal they wish their (civil) case to be examined under. This is takes place now, has always taken place and is very basic to English common law. The only strange thing is that governments have been in denial about this in recent decades. This is part of a decay of civil society that is consequent on understanding our relationships to each other only in terms of rights (and never responsibilities) and understanding governments as service-providers and ourselves as consumers of their products. The result of this is that we believe that governments are to do everything and we are to nothing: over the long term this makes for totalitarianism - and it is no less totalitarian because we are complicit in it.
The Archbishop believes it is ‘unavoidable’ that this denial, of civil society, by governments and people, should come to an end. He is right that it should come to an end, and I hope he is right that its end is ‘unavoidable’. But if this sort of intelligent, and Christian, contribution to the public square is so vehemently jeered off by the media (BBC is no different from the Murdoch press in this) a smaller, stupider public square in which no one dare say anything intelligent (never mind anything Christian) is the only ‘unavoidable’ thing here. Like any Christian, an Archbishop can take a lot of flack from opponents of the Church, and it is his priestly calling to do so.
February 9th, 2008 at 02:41 pm
I think it is important to break the ice and air issues that are or may have been acting as inhibitors towards national integration/cohesion. In order to promote cohesion in our communities we need to promote neutral meeting points where sensitive issues need to be discussed without treading on the ever so tender toes of PC. A creative abrasion type of environment is highly important for a healthy vibrant society. Christians have been and are continuing to provide neutral grounds where these issues can be aired and discussed openly.
There are other forums where we can facilitate and unveil the illusions of consensus. Academic institutions are an excellent example. Only yesterday, I was able to discuss Dr Rowan’s statement from a very objective manner with my students. The response was phenomenal and everyone participated with assertive and yet very valuable insights.
In conclusion it is highly important to facilitate an honest debate about issues that can or may have been inhibiting integration within our communities.
Let us not shoot the messenger but discuss the content of the message. Dr Rowan’s statement has exposed the tip of the ice berg of a very important area that needs further exploration and discussion.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:28 am
In the US, reporting on religious affairs, and notably, Christianity, is significantly less educated about religion, than many other subjects covered. This condition is fertile ground for widespread dismissiveness and an easy hostility to Christianity, attitudes that are acute in more than one major news medium, print, or non-print.
I have only read reports of the Archibishop’s lecture and if anyone could provide a link to the original, please do so. [See top item of Media Watch on this site. Ed.]
In the US, there is also widespread ignorance and denial, quite shrill in some parts, of the foundations of civil law in Judeo-Christian beliefs and the living faiths which shaped American history. It is symptomatic of a greater ignorance of the specific influences of Christianity and Judaism on Western civilization.
It does appear that the next wave of totalitarianisms in the West are ones we welcome with open arms via ideological dudgeon, particularly towards Christianity. Sort of like claiming that everything British is imperialistic. We would be fragile creatures if we became entrapped by mistakes, unable to leaven our future with accomplishments of hope, inspiration or beauty, not to mention for Christians, divine intent for humanity.
I too believe that one sure way to lose civil freedoms is to have no enduring, positive content for them, of the kind that Christianity has provided for millenia.
If Prof. Knight is correct that the Archbishop’s lecture challenged Christian nations to renewed vigilance against what passes for received wisdom of the day, I applaud and thank the Archbishop for doing so. Please continue, Archbishop. I am listening.
February 21st, 2008 at 08:39 am
The issue is rather more complex than may at first appear. Christian denominations have internal regulations for managing chruch affairs but these do not in any way over-rule or replace civil law. Likewise as UK’s Rabbi Rosen has pointed out, the Beth Din rules apply to Jews in a voluntary capacity only, and they may choose to sort out a family or synogogue problem through the Beth Din structure. But again these rules and internal legal arrangements do not conflict with or provide a parallel legal system. Shariah law is a complete system of law and is deemd by the Quran to be God’s law and therefore by reason of this it over-rides human governmen-determined laws. Whilst Muslims want to live under Shariah law to be able to be real Muslims (and thus they fight for the application of Shariah as they have done in Northern Nigeria and Aceh), it is of no satisfaction to have only parts of Shariah. But some Muslims will happily accept part of Shariah in the first instance and then will develop a campaign to have this extended. Ultimately a country must treat all its citizens equallyand therefore if some segments of the community can have parallel laws then civil law has failed, and every segment may demand rights for their laws and courts to be adopted also. Every country must also decide is if it will reduce the host culture and its heritage and its laws to give space to a migrant community. By making such a concession the migrant community gains the upper hand in diminishing the rights of the host population. This in fact is the intention of Quranic driven Muslims. As each step is won there is encouragement to move on to the next step and so generate an openness to Islamic religion/ideology and to eventually making Islamic law the dominating law, as is the case now in the northern Nigerian States. Sadly, many Muslim migrants have become migrants to get away from the demands and pressures (and rough justice) of Shariah. So the last thing they want is to again face Shariah in their adopted country! This particularly applies to women in respect to marriage and divorce laws, and to many young people in respect to their parents’ decision to kill for the sake of ‘honour’ - a right under some interpretations of Shariah.