TIMESONLINE: Allowing British Muslims recourse to Islamic law would be a charter for male dominance and peer-group bullying
Sneakily, Britain's first Muslim Minister, Shahid Malik, has ducked the critics that he will enrage in an interview to be broadcast on Channel 4's Dispatches programme on Monday.
Knowing that the phrase he uses to describe the situation of British Muslims - “the Jews of Europe” - will make the headlines, he has put it in the mouths of others. “If you ask Muslims today what do they feel like,” he says, “they feel like the Jews of Europe.” He does not say if he thinks that they are right.
I'll respond in the Malik method. If you asked most non-Muslims what they feel about the suggestion, they would say that it was disgraceful, outrageous and insulting.
Mr Malik's assessment of how some British Muslims feel may be accurate; but they are wrong. Race is not the issue. Unless we face up honestly to the incompatibilities between aspects of the ways of life of some (not all) Muslim groups in Britain, and the British mainstream culture, we shall find ourselves babbling about racism when the issue has less to do with race than with culture.
That is why I thought the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, in a careful speech at the East London Muslim Centre on Thursday, slid too quickly over the trickiest parts of his argument. He was discussing the application of Sharia in England and Wales.
The speech has been variously reported as anything from a gentle warning to cultural separatists within Islam, to a craven endorsement of the compromising speech about Sharia made by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, last year. Lord Phillips took as his theme and title Equality Before the Law. This was shrewder than it was brave.
“Equality” is a dummy concept in the philosophy of law. Here it allowed both speaker and audience to overlook real differences between them, because everyone is in favour of equality. But Lord Phillips was wrong to say that only recently has English law developed a respect for equality. Common Law and Statute have always regarded everyone as “equal before the law”, but depending on who and what you are and what you've done, your rights may differ. A cat burglar and a householder are not equal before the law. An under-age teenager and an adult, a British citizen and an illegal immigrant, are not equal. An in-catchment-area and out-of-catchment-area parent are not (in their children's access to a local school) equal. It's all a question of category; the categories of citizen that our laws create do and must create differences - inequalities - in the rights of individuals. We Can’t All Be Equal under Different Laws >>> By Matthew Parris | July 5. 2008
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