Williams is dangerous. He must be resisted

The Archbishop's ideas on Sharia and autonomy for faith communities are badly misguided

Matthew Parris

You say,” said Lord Napier (confronted as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India by locals protesting against the suppression of suttee) “that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

The present Archbishop of Canterbury is no Napier. He was not, however, proposing tolerance for the wilder excesses of Sharia, let alone suttee, in his speech on Thursday. Rowan Williams is not in favour of letting people stone adultresses, or chop off thieves' hands, or force the marriages of daughters. He made it clear that a line must be drawn. But he failed to say why or how. And it is that failure that marks what I hope is just the incoherence - but fear may be the disingenuousness - of the Archbishop's argument.

It is not useful, it is not even interesting, to begin an argument on whether Sharia should be given some kind of status within British law, unless you think there are otherwise potential conflicts. I am not aware of speeches by Anglican clerics stoutly defending the proposition that the rules of chess, or football, or the Caravan Club, or Boodles, or indeed the governance of the Church of England, should be permitted sway within their own domains by British law. They already are. No defence is called for. They challenge nobody and nobody challenges them.

Only when rules agreed among a group's own members (let us call these “private laws”) sit uneasily with the spirit of the law of the land (let us call this “the general law”) does any issue arise. Hence (for example) the controversies about smoking in private clubs, or the exclusion of women, Jews or blacks from private-members-only organisations. Unless, therefore, Dr Williams is proposing that elements of Sharia should be tolerated even though they appear to conflict with the general law, he is saying nothing interesting.

Full post @ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article3337984.ece