Note: This is a longer version of an article published in the April 2008 Faith and Freedom.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the “first among equals” of bishops and archbishops in the worldwide Anglican Communion, shocked people around the world on February 7. After delivering a lecture entitled “Civil Law and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective” at the Royal Courts of Justice, Williams argued in a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio One interview that partial implementation of Muslim shari’a (i.e., Islamic law) inEngland “seems unavoidable.” That single comment set off a firestorm of criticism around the world, and the rest of his lecture and interview only added more fuel to the fire. While Williams had his defenders, they were in the distinct minority. Later analysts said that it was the low point of Williams’ five-year career as Archbishop of Canterbury, and it resulted in several public calls for his resignation.
The archbishop’s handlers reacted defensively, apparently caught off guard by the intensity of the criticism. They suggested that the archbishop had been misunderstood, but while both they and Williams purposefully clarified the remarks, no one backtracked on them. “[M]any Muslim majority countries do distinguish clearly between the rights of citizens overall and the duties accepted by some citizens of obedience to Islamic law,” the archbishop asserted in his clarifications before the General Synod. “It is this that encourages me to think that there may be ways of engaging with the world of Islamic law on something other than an all-or-nothing basis.”
The Larger Context
Significantly downplayed in the furor was the context within which Williams’ remarks took place: He was addressing the issue of how religious beliefs could be accommodated in a secular society. “[D]anger … occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity,” he warned in his lecture. The archbishop bemoaned the way that secular society sometimes dismisses religious beliefs as “belong[ing] exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice” instead of the public square.
Williams asserted that religious beliefs may particularly be threatened with marginalization when societies exalt rights that oppose religious beliefs. Using abortion as an example, he approvingly noted that British law allows Roman Catholic and other Christian doctors to follow their consciences and not perform abortions, even while British society favors abortion rights. “[C]learly the refusal of a religious believer to act upon the legal recognition of a right is not, given the plural character of society, a denial to anyone inside or outside the community of access to that right,” he asserted in the lecture.
Williams argued that the law in secular states needs to account for religious consciences, and that one way of doing this is to allow for religious law rulings in cases where that law does not oppose fundamental civil rights. He held open the possibility that Muslims could use shari’a as opposed to secular law, as a basis for resolving marital disputes and financial matters. He claimed that this model was already being followed in British society, with Jewish courts being allowed to settle some Jewish matters. (In a question-and-answer session held after the lecture, he clarified that he did not mean that Jewish law was incorporated into British law, but that British society had accommodated certain Jewish customs through the Jewish courts.) The archbishop did not think that implementing this proposal of “supplementary jurisdiction” would be easy, but that some accommodation would be necessary in pluralistic societies where people hold diverse religious beliefs and cannot conscientiously agree with prevailing secular law.
Serious Concerns
Yet Williams’ remarks provided serious reasons for concern even given the archbishop’s valid interest in the rights of people of faith in secular society. Perhaps most fundamentally, the archbishop clearly gave great weight to progressive Muslim understandings of shari’a and downplayed the shari’aenforced and applied by traditional Muslims whom he called “primitivists.” He told Radio One, “it seems to me … that the [British] court is regarding [shari’a] as a single fixed entity and a great many Muslim jurists would now say that this is not how you need to see it.” The archbishop claimed that “the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recogni[z]e … political plurality as consistent with Muslim integrity.”
But political plurality has not been held in high esteem in countries around the world where shari’a dominates and oppresses other people. The Anglican Archbishop of the Diocese of Jos in Nigeria, the Most Rev. Ben Kwashi, when interviewed by the BBC in response to Williams, warned that people cannot eliminate the more inhuman aspects of shari’a. “[O]nce you ask for the first step of [shari’a] you are going to get to the last of it,” he said. “By 1960 when Nigeria got [i]ndependence, it began as penal code. Once it came to this generation they upgraded it to full blown [shari’a]. So it is only a matter of time when you begin from somewhere that you get to the real thing.”
That “real thing” is far different from the more peaceful forms of shari’a advocated by Muslim progressives. Kwashi spoke ominously to the BBC of hands being cut off and stonings, and lesser problems are not unknown in Western countries. In England, some Muslim communities have set up shari’a courts to rule primarily on marital and financial issues, but criminal cases are also sometimes heard. Many Muslims have had issues resolved informally in these courts and never have brought matters before British courts. The Times of London reported on one such case in 2007, when shari’a was used to resolve a criminal case where one youth was stabbed by other teenagers. Those who committed the heinous act were ordered to in some way compensate the victim by the shari’a court, and the matter never reached British courts. Critics of the shari’a courts have also expressed concern that shari’a favors men and restricts women’s rights in marital issues.
A second concern raised by many critics of Williams was that the archbishop’s calls for “supplementary jurisdiction” in effect amounted to a repudiation of Western jurisprudence, which revolves around the idea that all people are equal under one law. Williams himself clearly was aware of this implication. “It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a ‘market’ element, a competition for loyalty” between different systems of law, he admitted in his lecture. “But if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of divers[e] and overlapping affiliations work for a common good, and in which groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable,” the archbishop concluded.
Critics strongly disagreed. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord George Carey, warned, “There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land which have been so painfully honed by the struggle for democracy and human rights. [Williams’] acceptance of some Muslim laws within British law would be disastrous for the nation.” Similarly, the Pakistani-born Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, called Williams’ proposal unworkable, arguing thatshari’a would harm the “integrity” of English law and “would be in tension with the English legal tradition” on many issues. (Nazir-Ali has received death threats from radical Muslims offended by his recent statements that it’s not safe for non-Muslims to enter some Muslim-dominated areas of Britain.) Several government officials also criticized Williams for undermining the British ideal of equality under one law.
And while Williams had expressed concern over secularism in theUnited Kingdom, several British commentators referred to British law as being founded on Christian principles. Nazir-Ali said, “English law is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and, in particular, our notions of human freedom derive from that tradition.” Letter writers toEngland’s top newspapers debated how greatly English law was influenced by Christianity.
Furthermore, while Jewish courts indeed have been used in some rulings, as the archbishop stated, “the courts are entirely . . . subordinate to the British legal system” according to the Times. That situation, then, is considerably different from the one that Williams proposed.
A third concern raised by those who lived in areas with shari’a was a very practical one: How could Williams speak up for those suffering under shari’a after his recent comments? Kwashi raised the issue before the BBC: “When [the] Archbishop of Canterbury … comes to visit us, we will take him to our leaders, some of whom are Muslims and some of whom are Christians, and he can then speak on our behalf where we are not having a fair share. Can we now look up to him as a man who can speak on our behalf?” Kwashi also noted that Williams’ comments would make life difficult for Christians in Nigerian states where shari’a was implemented. “[I]f he, the primate of England, is the one asking for [shari’a], now what he has done is to arm those who will now have more arguments against us who are saying[,] ‘We don’t need [shari’a].'” It seemed that Williams’ comments could well hurt Christians and others persecuted by shari’a in their plight.
Fourth, at a time when the Anglican Communion itself was in danger of splintering, Williams’ comments seemed to give many Anglican leaders only more reason to doubt his leadership capabilities. Archbishop Peter Akinola, the Anglican Primate of All Nigeria, told the Times that Williams’ comments were “most disturbing.” Many English clergymen expressed dismay at Williams’ comments. The calls for Williams’ resignation, mostly from government officials and news pundits, provided the strongest denunciation of the archbishop’s leadership.
Survival
In the end, Williams survived the worldwide criticism, thanks partially to his defenders. Prime Minister Gordon Brown praised him as “a man of integrity.” Carey, Williams’ immediate predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, called his successor “a great leader in the Anglican tradition … [who] has a very important role to play in the Church.” Both men had serious concerns over Williams’ statements but rejected any idea that Williams should leave the office. Some people, as well, were willing to forgive Williams, a former professor, for expressing a very academic point-of-view that would have been welcomed for debate in that setting but which had been disastrous politically. The Archbishop of Canterbury would face more trials in the days ahead, but he had survived this skirmish, even if it had resulted in the worst press and most controversy of his career.
See Also: The Larger Rationale for Williams’ Remarks
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