Has the Archbishop Gone Bonkers?

I take no credit, and, I hope, no blame, for the title of this post. Yesterday's lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury titled 'Islam in English Law: Civil and Religious Law in England' has met with a deafening outcry, including newspaper headlines screaming 'Victory for Terrorism' and columnists asking 'Has the Archbishop Gone Bonkers?' The newspapers might leave one with the impression that the Archbishop wants us all to live under Muslim law, including Muslim criminal law. On reading the lecture (available here) one wonders if all the fuss stems from the demonization of Islam, as opposed to the actual content of the lecture.

The Archbishop was in fact making the case for the coexistence of secular and religious legal systems in the civil sphere. While I tend to disagree with the proposition that we should regress to a state in which religion enters the public sphere to a greater extent than by informing societal norms, I must admit that the Archbishop makes a compelling case for normative pluralism:

Societies that are in fact ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse are societies in which identity is formed, as we have noted by different modes and contexts of belonging, ‘multiple affiliation’. The danger is in acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.

It must be emphasised that the suggestion was premised with the caveat that we must be '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.'

Of course, the proviso is vague at best. It says nothing about the finer details of the effects of choices of Islamic law and Islamic courts. How could the gender inequalities in Islamic family law be accommodated in the English legal system, particularly following the adoption of the Human Rights Act? If Sharia courts are to have jurisdiction that is recognised and enforced by the State, those courts would have to accept some limitations to the precepts of Quranic law - a blasphemous notion.

In sum, while the Archbishop's lecture should create a legitimate discussion as opposed to the predominant sensationalist reporting, I remain quite unconvinced that we should tinker with the status quo.


UPDATE: The Propaganda Box has an excellent piece about this titled 'Has Ruth Gledhill (and everyone else) gone bonkers?' To her credit, Ruth Gledhill links up to The Propaganda Box in her own blog post from which I borrowed this post's title.