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Walter Watts
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Wrong, Dr Williams, but the debate is right
« on: 2008-02-10 18:43:56 » |
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Wrong, Dr Williams, but the debate is right
Leader
The Observer, Sunday February 10 2008
This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday February 10 2008 on p34 of the Comment section. It was last updated at 02:05 on February 10 2008.
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If Rowan Williams did not anticipate the furore that would be caused by his speech on the evolving role of sharia law in Britain, then he was naive to the point of foolishness. If he had even an inkling of the vitriol that would be poured on him within hours of making his observations, and went ahead regardless, he was brave to the point of foolhardiness.
Given how intemperate in many quarters the response to the archbishop has been, it is worth pausing to consider what it is exactly that is under debate. Any attempt at clarification throws up three distinct questions. First, what did Dr Williams actually say? Second, was he right? And third, was it wise of him, as head of the Church of England, to be passing judgment on Islamic law one way or another?
The first question is in many ways the trickiest. The archbishop delivered a long lecture in nuanced and often opaque language that defies easy synopsis. It lends itself to both a pragmatic and an ideological interpretation.
The pragmatic one is as follows: Britain is home to at least 1.6m Muslims. Many of them choose to run their lives, like followers of other faiths, in accordance with religious law. They want to marry, divorce, lend, borrow and generally conduct their affairs in accordance with sharia. But there is no mechanism in British society for recognising in public law the decisions they have made in private. Such mechanisms do exist for other religions. So fairness dictates that it should be technically easier for Muslims to get state recognition for their faith-based judicial rulings, as long as the choices sanctioned by sharia do not contravene the law of the land.
The ideological interpretation of Dr Williams's ideas goes thus: it is an article of faith for Muslims to submit themselves first and foremost to sharia law, which derives its authority from God. Christians, who share the same God, should be able to recognise in that something admirable. If a community wants to govern itself in peaceful piety according to its scriptures, the law should make every possible accommodation for them. Muslims should not be forced to choose between loyalty to God and loyalty to the state.
The pragmatic version of Dr Williams's view could be taken as much as a statement about globalisation as about religion. The complexion of Britain has changed dramatically. Since sharia has become a fact of life for many British citizens, the state cannot ignore it. Finding ways to smooth the passage of immigrants into British civic structures may aid social cohesion. It should, for example, be easier to have a marriage in a mosque recognised as a bona fide legal union.
But such pragmatism glosses over the possibility that even the most selective recognition of sharia, limiting it to matrimonial matters, for example, would quickly collide with British traditions of civil rights. Women's status, for example, is unambiguously inferior in Islamic divorces. Dr Williams's apparent blindness to that point is what makes the ideological interpretation of his speech especially worrying. Divinely inspired dogma (be it from the Koran, Leviticus or the Epistles of St Paul) is easily interpreted to justify bigotry.
Even if we accept, as Dr Williams seems glibly happy to do, that there is no appetite among British Muslims for the more famously brutal applications of sharia as practised in countries such as Saudi Arabia, it is quite wrong to suggest that God's word could be equivalent to parliamentary statute in regulating a diverse society. Dr Williams can believe that if he wants to and the law protects his right to express that view.
But for him to continue enjoying that freedom - and, crucially, for others to be free to disagree - secular law must have unequivocal primacy. Sometimes, religious believers will be forced to choose whom they obey, a religious judge or a civil one. They must choose the latter every time. Democracy and the rule of law demand it.
So Dr Williams is right on some of the detail (working towards a better understanding of sharia to help Muslims integrate) and wrong on the big picture (deferring to God's law over man's). That leaves the third question: was he right to say anything on this subject at all?
The passions unleashed by Dr Williams's intervention prove that the debate is necessary. It is telling that politicians of all stripes hurried to oppose the archbishop, not by rebutting his view, but on the grounds that its mere expression in public was divisive. In other words, the secular establishment is afraid of debating Dr Williams on his own terms. Showing shrewd judgment and cowardice in equal measure, Westminster chose collectively to keep secret its feelings about Islam, God, the church and the state. Politicians running scared from a debate is evidence that it is necessary.
Rowan Williams's position as head of the established church gives him a double advantage in inaugurating that debate. First, he is a Christian. Had a high-profile imam made the same point, he would have been swiftly denounced as a dangerous extremist. No one could make the same claim of the archbishop, although some hysterical commentators have come close. Second, his church enjoys unique privileges in law. The Queen is its nominal head. So Dr Williams is speaking from a position of power. He is not pleading for special favours for his own followers. He can rightly claim to be advancing a purely academic argument from a position of relative neutrality: a believer but not a Muslim, a figure of the establishment but not a politician. For all the controversy, it is perhaps appropriate that the tricky relationship between divine and secular authority in Britain be explored by the successor to Thomas à Beckett.
The sad truth that has emerged in recent days is that, while Britain needs this debate, it appears to lack the discipline to conduct it in a civilised way. The scale of the backlash, some of the language used and the haste with which some opponents of the archbishop have reached for crude stereotypes of Islam is dispiriting. It is unedifying to see the majority culture turn with near unanimous scorn on a minority. It suggests that secular Britain is deeply insecure about the durability of its own culture.
If we see even a stolid, closely argued lecture by a respected church leader as an existential threat, we must be woefully lacking in faith - not in God, but in the institutions and traditions that make our law.
So Rowan Williams was perfectly entitled to speak his mind. But he could have spared himself a lot of trouble by explaining himself more clearly. His allies in the church might plea naivety on his behalf, but a man in his position - with massive constitutional responsibility - must anticipate the political as well as the theological consequences of his words. He should have predicted that people would leap on the most incendiary interpretation of his speech: that sharia courts should one day be recognised as equivalent to civil ones as a source of law in Britain. If he meant anything even close to that, he is plain wrong.
But a competition has emerged in recent days quite separate from the theoretical rivalry between sharia and parliamentary law that Dr Williams wanted to debate. It is a contest that reveals just as much about modern Britain as any treatise on faith. It is the contrast between reasonable, sensible exposition of an idea, whatever its merits, and unthinking, poisonous, prejudiced reaction. From that competition, for all his wrong-headedness and naivety, Dr Williams emerges on the moral high ground.
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Walter Watts
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