Bravo, Rowan, says Jeevan Vasagar breezily. Well, he’s a man; easy for him to say.

In Tanzania, for example, Muslim family law applies to Muslim citizens. When it comes to questions of divorce, custody and inheritance, Muslim families settle their disputes at courts unique to their communities.

Yes we know, and Muslim family law treats women and men unequally. That is the problem.

There’s an interesting clash here – a classic liberal dilemma. Do you promote the rights of a minority community or do you worry more about the rights of Muslim women, who may get treated less generously under sharia than under secular law?

It’s not really a dilemma once you think about it hard enough. Just for one … Read the rest

There’s that report on Honour-based violence in the UK. It starts off by discussing forced marriage – and right away I got snagged by an obstacle.

According to most definitions, a marriage becomes forced if any coercion, physical or psychological, [is] used against either spouses [sic] in order to force them to consent. A forced marriage is not the same as an arranged marriage which occurs with the full consent of both parties.

No the obstacle isn’t how desperately the report needs copy-editing; it’s full of mistakes and typos, but that’s not the obstacle. The obstacle is that item about the full consent. What is full consent? Under what conditions is it possible? How prevalent are such conditions? All … Read the rest

I transcribed something the Archbishop said just before the ‘bit of a danger’ remark.

A lot of what’s written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody. Now, that principle, that there’s one law for everybody, is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties, which shape and dictate how they behave in society – and that the law needs to take some account of that. An approach to law which simply said ‘There’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said’ –

I got a record number of email messages alerting me to the Archbishop’s fun new ideas on the subject of law and religion, which seems to hint that they may not be as sound as they are exciting.

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Quite so. UK murderers, rapists, extortionists, batterers – they do not relate to the British legal system. Good idea to face up to that fact, if one hasn’t already. But is it a good idea to actually adopt ‘certain aspects’ of murderers’, rapists’, extortionists’, batterers’ law? I would say no.… Read the rest

Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial is a fascinating book. And it’s highly relevant to the question of whether or not it’s a good idea to debate Irving. Holocaust Denial on Trial has Evans’s report for the trial; see for instance his General Conclusion.

Irving is a particularly dangerous spokesperson for Holocaust denial because over the years he has consistently portrayed himself as a scrupulous historian with an unrivalled knowledge of the archival sources and an unerring eye for forgeries and falsifications. As we saw in Part I, he has repeatedly claimed that he is waging a ‘campaign for real history’ against legend and myth, truth against falsehood. ‘Real history’, he says, is