THE TELEGRAPH: Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has many fine qualities: he is unquestionably sincere, well-meaning, and intelligent. He has manifested an admirable commitment to upholding spiritual values. But his position as leader of the Church of England requires him to have another virtue: that of judgment. And unfortunately, the events of last week have shown a surprising and regrettable lapse of judgment.
He must have known what he was getting into when he entered the minefield of whether Muslim communities should be able to regulate themselves by sharia law. He has insisted that he did not mean to imply that they should be allowed to have a parallel legal system, existing alongside the law of the land. But the fact is that what he did say was so obscure, imprecise and difficult to follow that it could easily be interpreted as endorsing precisely the position from which he has now gone to such pains to distance himself.
A BBC radio studio is not a seminar room, and a lecture in public is not the same as a symposium with academic colleagues. Public debate inevitably operates in bolder, clearer, less sophisticated colours than the nuances of High Table conversation - a reality which the Archbishop may not like, but has to live with for as long as he is head of the Anglican Communion. The media coverage which reported him - wrongly, he insists - as advocating the granting of legal legitimacy to sharia courts was wholly understandable, for his words appeared to support that view. The blame for the resulting uproar must ultimately rest with Rowan Williams himself. Had he spoken in a less ambiguous style, his musings on how "to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state" would in all probability have been ignored.
They were not, however, ignored. And the fact remains that the Archbishop has got into a pickle from which he has yet to extricate himself. His language was not only unclear: his thinking was uncharacteristically muddled. His suggestion that the British state should recognise different kinds of justice, including sharia, because that would enable people with different religious convictions to feel "loyal" to British society, is preposterous: it is a recipe, not for the social cohesion and unity which he says he craves, but for separatism and conflict. Far from overcoming cultural conflict, its primary effect would be to enforce division by emphasising it. In his effort to find an accommodation with other religions, in particular Islam… >>>
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)
