Author: Ophelia Benson

It’s kind of the BBC to explain about sharia for us.

Sharia rulings have been developed to help Muslims understand how they should lead every aspect of their lives according to God’s wishes.

Well, not exactly – not according to God’s wishes, because no one knows what those are (or if there are such things); according to what they think are God’s wishes. The BBC tactfully skipped over that rather important difference, but that is what’s at stake here. Not God’s wishes but what believers believe are God’s wishes (and the rest of us don’t).

Apostasy, or leaving the faith, is a very controversial issue in the Muslim world and the majority of scholars believe it is punishable by death…The Koran itself declares there is “no compulsion” in religion.

Uh huh. And Sura 40 says that those who reject the scriptures will have iron collars and chains placed around their necks, be dragged into scalding water and burnt in the fire. The Beeb doesn’t mention that though.

The most amazing item is the last. In reply to the rather gormless question ‘So women have reservations about Sharia?’ Dominic Casciani says:

Some Muslim women in the West would be worried about protection of their rights in Sharia courts where there is discrimination against them because of patriarchal and cultural control in their communities. This does not mean that they are necessarily opposed to Sharia – only there are live concerns about the fairness of its application. It’s fair to say that many leading Muslim women are more concerned about how existing British equality measures and human rights laws can be used to improve their position and voice in society.

You bet; perfectly fair.

I read the whole archepiscopal speech a couple of days ago; that makes two of the archbishop’s speeches I’ve read in their entirety in the last couple of weeks. That’s a lot of waffly Williamsese to get through. I would love to do a really thorough line-by-line fisking, because every line deserves it – but it would take forever, and would be a baroque kind of luxury, because no one is convinced by the archbishop anyway. So I’m not going to do a line-by-line job, but I could give you a few highlights. Would you like that? Okay then.

One item is that it takes him until the bottom of page 3 (of very closely-printed pages) to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

[R]ecognition of ‘supplementary jurisdiction’ in some areas, especially family law, could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women…The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens.

How very true! Or to put it another way, no kidding! And what a staggeringly long time it took him to get around to saying so, and what a lot of verbiage he muffles the admission in even when he does manage to get to it.

I mention it partly because of its gravity as an issue in interfaith relations and in discussions of human rights and the treatment of minorities, partly to illustrate how the recognition of what I have been calling membership in different but overlapping sets of social relationship (what others have called ‘multiple affiliations’) can provide a framework for thinking about these neuralgic questions of the status of women and converts.

That – along with the usual verbose opacity – is just one example of an extremely annoying trope he uses throughout, and which he uses again in his self-defense today: he keeps suggesting we need to think about these things, as if no one had been thinking about them until now! Where’s he been? We’ve been thinking about them, for months and years – we don’t need the head of the Church of England to suggest that we do what we’re already doing! And we don’t need his help with the thinking, either.

So the second objection to an increased legal recognition of communal religious identities can be met if we are prepared to think about the basic ground rules that might organise the relationship between jurisdictions, making sure that we do not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction.

We are prepared to think, more prepared than the archbishop is, by the looks of it; but the only way to make sure we don’t collude with these unexamined systems (there it is again – what makes him think they’re unexamined? unexamined by whom? him?) is to decline to give them any ‘supplementary jurisdiction.’ All he’s doing is re-inventing the wheel. We know all this, we got here long ago, and that’s exactly why we want no truck with sharia.

And from the final paragraph – where he goes all pomo –

In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of ‘deconstruction’ of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment. But as I have hinted, I do not believe this can be done without some thinking also about the very nature of law. It is always easy to take refuge in some form of positivism…

Oh gawd. Has he been reading Tina Beattie? Nadia Urbinati? He should go for more health-giving walks.

He just doesn’t get it.

Part of the “burden and the privilege of being the Church” in the UK meant, Dr Williams said, the clergy needed “some coherent voice on behalf of all the faith communities living here”…The relationship between law and religion was a subject on which “Christians and people of other faiths ought to be doing some reflecting together”, he added.

No it isn’t, because there shouldn’t be any such relationship, for reasons which the Archbish himself mentions in the speech – without, of course, perceiving them as reasons.

[A]s any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular…[S]haria depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God…To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system…There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a ‘covenant’ between the divine and the human.

Religion is about what believers consider the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants, without having any reliable way of knowing that, or testing it, or falsifying it. It’s eternal and absolute, yet humans know nothing whatever about it – yet they claim that they do. This is an abysmal epistemic situation from which to make laws. That is why Arch should shut up about the relationship between law and religion, because there shouldn’t be one. Humans can’t make decent laws by ‘relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a ‘covenant’ between the divine and the human’ – because there is no such covenant, or if there is, it’s odd that we have no real evidence of it (no, a very old story does not count as evidence). The archbishop comes right out and admits that his side of the aisle deals in the non-negotiable, and yet he wants the rest of us to let his crowd help shape the law. Forget it. The combination of the unknown-unknowable and the non-negotiable is poisonous. That’s why law should be secular; that’s why theocracies are nightmare places; it’s appalling that Rowan Williams doesn’t get that.

Matthew Parris considers the archbishop dangerous.

It is not useful, it is not even interesting, to begin an argument on whether Sharia should be given some kind of status within British law, unless you think there are otherwise potential conflicts…Unless, therefore, Dr Williams is proposing that elements of Sharia should be tolerated even though they appear to conflict with the general law, he is saying nothing interesting. They do conflict. And what happens when they do? The moment a private law appears to defy the general law, one question, and one alone, becomes central. It is the question of consent…Of group members, of course – and first – we must ask: is consent real, unanimous, complete? Is there duress? Is there undue influence? How about children? Who truly speaks for the group? What opportunities are offered to opt out?

And boy did the archbishop skate gracefully over that.

A religion, properly understood, makes profound claims on an individual and community, quite unlike the demands of a golf club. It involves the…subordination of the individual’s will; and may demand that he subordinate his spouse’s and children’s wills too. Hence our unease about duress, and the completeness of “consent”. Dr Williams, in a welter of words, makes no serious attempt to resolve this. Those who read his speech properly will see that his entire argument turns upon the freedom of the group member to “opt out” of the “supplementary jurisdiction” and choose British law instead. But repressive faith groups make it culturally difficult – sometimes well-nigh impossible – for a member to opt out.

Pre-cisely. He pretended he was taking consent into account without actually doing so. He simply waved at it as he skated past, he didn’t engage with it.

As Parris points out, this is not progressive or pc gone mad, it’s profoundly conservative.

Dr Williams’s ideas really represent the wilder fringes of a bigger idea: communitarianism. Communitarianism can come in a surplice, a yarmulka or from a minaret and is all the more dangerous because armed with a divine rather than a local loyalty. It almost always proves a repressive and reactionary force, fearful of competitors, often anti-science, sometimes sceptical of knowledge itself, and grudging towards the State. There is absolutely nothing “left-wing” or woolly-liberal about empowering it. A Britain in which Muslim communities policed themselves would be more ruthlessly policed, and probably more law-abiding than today. But it would be a Britain in which the individual Muslim – maybe female, maybe ambitious, maybe gay, maybe a religious doubter – would lose their chances of rescue from his or her family or community by the State.

A hell on earth, in short.