New Sharia Row Over Chancellor’s Plans for ‘Islamic Bonds’
THE MAIL ON SUNDAY: A new sharia law controversy erupted last night over Government plans to issue special "Islamic bonds" to pay for Gordon Brown's public-spending programme by raising money from the Middle East.

Britain is to become the first Western nation to issue bonds approved by Muslim clerics in line with sharia law, which bans conventional loans involving interest payments as "sinful".

The scheme would mark one of the most significant economic advances of sharia law in the non-Muslim world.

It will lead to the ownership of Government buildings and other assets currently belonging to British taxpayers being switched wholesale to wealthy Middle-Eastern businessmen and banks.

The Government sees sharia-compliant bonds as a way of tapping Middle-East money and building bridges with the Muslim community.

But critics say the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain's financial and legal systems.

Senior Conservative MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, said: "I am concerned about the signal this would send – it could be the thin end of the wedge.

"British Common Law must be supreme and should apply to everyone." New sharia row over Chancellor's plans for 'Islamic bonds' >>> By Simon Walters

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Archbishop Won’t Back Down Over Shariah Row
THE TELEGRAPH: The Archbishop of Canterbury has refused to back down over his controversial comments on Islamic law, but admitted his intervention had been "clumsy".

Dr Rowan Williams said much of the storm he had provoked last week when he argued that aspects of sharia could be incorporated in the English legal system had been based on misunderstandings.

Speaking to the General Synod in London, the Church's "parliament", he insisted it was "not inappropriate for a pastor of the Church of England" to address issues about the "perceived concerns of other religious communities".

However, he failed to quell all the criticism from within the Synod, a handful of members of which have called for his resignation.

While the vast majority rallied to his defence by greeting his arrival with a sustained minute-long standing ovation, a small number refused to join in the applause.

After his speech, Canon Christopher Sugden, a conservative evangelical from Oxford, challenged Dr William's arguments and called for an emergency debate, saying sharia law could never be subservient to any other system. Canon Sugden, of the Anglican Mainstream organization, claimed a full apology was the only response the Archbishop could give.

"He has caused great difficulties for our colleagues, especially in Nigeria, especially in countries where there is significant Muslim pressure for sharia to come in," he said. Archbishop won’t back down over sharia row >>> By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent

The Archbishop Speaks Out

THE TELEGRAPH:
Dr Rowan Williams's gift to Gordon Brown By Rachel Sylvester

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At Least the Ayatollah of Canterbury Is Honest, Mr Brown
THE MAIL ON SUNDAY: The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it.

Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women.
It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much.

Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.

And what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?
Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty. [Source: At least the Ayatollah of Canterbury is honest, Mr Brown] - By Peter Hitchens

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Archbishop of Canterbury Gone Bonkers
HUMAN EVENTS: When even the religion reporter for the Times of London has to ask if the Archbishop of Canterbury has gone bonkers, the question has become rhetorical. The answer is all too obvious.



Last Thursday morning, February 7, Rowan Williams -- the Archbishop of Canterbury, top man in the hierarchy of the Church of England -- took to the airwaves. In a BBC Radio Four interview, he said that the United Kingdom will eventually have to adopt Islamic Sharia Law -- on a limited basis -- on the premise that this will create social cohesion. 



His words have had quite an impact -- perhaps best compared to the effect of dropping a suitcase nuke into the room at high tea in Buckingham Palace. If there were any English still sleep walking through the destruction of their national identity, the ultimate wake up call just came. 



When Henry the 8th wanted a divorce and the Catholic Pope would not give it to him, the Church of England was born. Henry not only broke the bonds of fealty to the Pope, he seized all the property held by the Roman Church, dissolved their monasteries, killed or banished the Catholic clergy, and forced all surviving remnants of Catholicism in England underground for centuries. 



While he was at it, Henry ended all foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction over his Kingdom and made all future monarchs the titular head of the Anglican Church. Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth the First, fleshed out this policy. She decreed that the break with Rome restored to the Crown, “the ancient jurisdiction over the state -- ecclesiastical and spiritual -- abolishing all foreign power repugnant to the same.” This is not just an opinion. It is an Article in the founding document of the Church of England.



The Times’ religion editor, Ruth Gledhill, reviews this history and then adds her own ironic observation. “And now Queen Elizabeth II's very own Archbishop -- and let's not forget she is his Church's Supreme Governor - wants to introduce a new jurisdiction into this realm of England. And an Islamic one at that!” 



For those who might not be up to speed on Sharia law, it is not like The Ten Commandments or the Bill of Rights. It is not just Holy Law; it is wholly Holy secular law too. It is the all-inclusive law as imposed by a theocratic state. It governs everything from banking to marriage. And it carries some pretty heavy penalties, from cutting off the hands of thieves to stoning women caught in adultery, even if the adultery stems from a gang rape. It also looks the other way when fathers, brothers, or uncles kill family females who dare to date outside of Islam. These are known as “honor killings.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury supports his partially pro-Sharia law position by citing the inherent inequity which ensues when Catholic adoption agencies discriminate against gay couples. Of course, there are no gay people in Iran according to Ahmadinejad so that isn’t the best illustration the Archbishop might have chosen to make his point. In fact, instances of sharia law being carried out within British Muslim communities have been reported. A young man who knifed someone was judged by a Sharia court and let out on the streets when his family compensated his victim financially. Archbishop of Canterbury Gone Bonkers >>> By Susan Easton

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Address to the Opening of General Synod
Photo of Dr Rowan Williams courtesy of The Guardian
THE GUARDIAN: 'The prevailing attitude … was one of heavy disagreement with a number of things which the [speaker] had not said.' Ronald Knox's description of discussion at a student society in the 1930s has a certain familiarity after the last few days; but given that public comment and criticism has been cast in such highly coloured terms, I've thought it right to say a few words to Synod this afternoon about what was and wasn't said last week and what the questions were which I had hoped might benefit from some airing.

Some of what has been heard is a very long way indeed from what was actually said in the Royal Courts of Justice last Thursday. But I must of course take responsibility for any unclarity in either that text or in the radio interview, and for any misleading choice of words that has helped to cause distress or misunderstanding among the public at large and especially among my fellow Christians.

It's Lent, and one of the great penitential phrases of the Psalms will be in all our minds – 'Who can tell how oft he offendeth? Cleanse thou me from my secret faults.' I'm deeply grateful to many of you for the support as well as the challenges I've received this weekend, and for your willingness to treat all this as a serious issue that deserves attention. But I believe quite strongly that it is not inappropriate for a pastor of the Church of England to address issues around the perceived concerns of other religious communities and to try and bring them into better public focus.

I hope anyway that you'll bear with me now if I pick up a couple of points that I think have been distorted in the discussion. The lecture was written as an opening contribution to a series on Islam and English Law… >>>

THE GUARDIAN:
Archbishop Defends His Sharia Remarks By Louise Radnofsky

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Removing the State from Dr Rowan Williams
THE TELEGRAPH: The Archbishop of Canterbury said something stupid. What is to be done about it? There is now a fusillade of demands for his resignation rather as if he were a Chancellor of the Exchequer whose fatally bad judgment had undermined the economy.

In almost any other country in the world, this would seem bizarre but here, the parallel is apt.

The head of the Church of England is a political figure. Founded as a conscious bulwark against the Roman outfit to which the nation's enemies owed allegiance, the Anglican Church must play out its uncomfortable, anomalous role.



Dr Rowan Williams's latest pronouncements are, in a sense (or should I say, "in a very real sense"?) a peculiarly frank expression of the messy overlap between matters of state and of faith that is its remit. And, as so often happens with well-intentioned attempts at appeasement and compromise with the unacceptable, Dr Williams's intervention has made it clear how untenable all this now is.

The archbishop has discredited not just himself, and the über-tolerant multicultural lobby that he sought to support, but the position of the established Church. Removing the state from Dr Rowan Williams >>> By Janet Daley

THE TELEGRAPH:
Another Reason for Dr Williams to Resign

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Telegraph TV: Sharia Row

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