Blogula Rasa

I’m home sick today, listening to the BBC News Hour on WBEZ. There’s been a lot about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent comments regarding sharia law in Britain.

Here’s part of what he actually said, which was in a BBC News interview before a lecture before legal academics, where he went into more detail:

In an BBC interview before the lecture, Dr Williams said: “Certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law; so it’s not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system. . . There is a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some kinds of aspects of other religious law.” He made it clear that there was no question of adopting the extreme punishments or treatment of women found in some Islamic states.

The lecture is quite densely argued and is quoted extensively at the Church Times article, along with reactions from a number of people who clearly did not agree that sharia law could possibly be as nuanced and enlightened-sounding as laid out in Archbishop Rowan’s address. Here’s an excerpt:

DR WILLIAMS began by criticising sensational reporting of sharia cases. “What most people think they know of sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal punishments.” He quoted the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan: “Many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the merest mention of the word.”

But the matter of accommodating religious moral codes was important, not only because it spilled over “into some of the questions which have surfaced sharply in the last 12 months about the right of religious believers in general to opt out of certain legal provisions, as in the problems around Roman Catholic adoption agencies which emerged in relation to the Sexual Orientation Regulations last spring.”

He argued for a better understanding of sharia. “On the one hand, sharia 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; on the other, it is to some extent unfinished business so far as codified and precise provisions are concerned. “To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system.”

Islamic societies in general recognised a degree of religious pluralism, with the result that “the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful.” Though this would be “hotly contested by some committed Islamic primitivists . ….the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recognise this degree of political plurality as consistent with Muslim integrity.”

Although