Shari’a in the West is a collection of essays, edited by Rex Adhar and Nicholas Aroney, written by leading scholars from a range of countries, academic fields, and political and faith positions in reaction to some public lectures given by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales regarding the practice of Shari’a Law in the Western world. The excerpt below is taken from John Milbank’s essay ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury: The Man and the Theology Behind the Shari’a Lecture’ and focuses on the Muslim reaction to Dr Williams’s speech.
Over the first two weeks of February 2008 in the United Kingdom, a sizable controversy was stirred up by a lecture given to the Royal Courts of Justice by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Rowan Williams, entitled ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective’, and a prior interview which he gave to the BBC Radio 4 news programme, ‘The World at One’. In the course of both the talk and the interview, the Archbishop suggested that certain extensions of Shari’a law in Britain were both ‘unavoidable’ and also desirable from the double point of view of civil cohesion and the defence of the ‘group rights’ of religious bodies.
Public reactions to this pronouncement were both swift and overwhelmingly negative. The Prime Minister distanced himself from the remarks, declaring that there could be but one common law for all in Britain, which must be based upon ‘British values’. Most political leaders from all the main British political parties more or less followed suit. The popular press suggested that the Archbishop was clearly as mad as his hirsute appearance had always led them to suppose, while the quality press by and large accused him of extreme political naivety, obscurity, and misplaced academicism. Certain commentators at the higher end of the media spectrum dissented from the latter verdict, and allowed that Dr Williams had bravely raised issues of great future importance. They also conceded to him that some supplementary elements of the religious law of all three monotheistic traditions were already incorporated by British justice and that further extensions of this accommodation should not be ruled out.
Yet, with near unanimity they declared that he had gone too far in apparently condoning parallel legal systems with an option for people to have certain cases considered either by a civil or religious tribunal. Any such possibility was also condemned by the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the Rt Rev Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, and this was discretely echoed by the majority of even the Anglican bench of bishops. It was reported that only three per cent of the members of the Synod which helps to govern the Anglican Church in England favoured the Archbishop’s opinion, while up and down the country, on the Sunday following the initial furore, priests found themselves forced in their sermons to make some sort of allusion to it, and were only received well by their congregations if they wholeheartedly confirmed their support for one common law for all people resident in England. The population at large, encouraged by some sections of the media, predictably associated the word ‘Shari’a’ with the chopping-off of hands and the punishment of raped women as fornicators—a reaction which, it seems, the Archbishop’s advisors had predicted and warned him against.