Sharia, Anglican—style: the archbishop of Canterbury is a special kind of fool

National Review, March 10, 2008 by Anthony Daniels

AT what point does otherworldliness become mere stupidity? At what point does woolly benevolence become vanity and spiritual pride? At what point does willful blindness become plain cowardice? At what point does intellectual incoherence become downright dishonesty?

These are but a few of the questions raised by the recent pronouncements of Rowan Williams, present archbishop of Canterbury and successor to St. Anselm. In a lecture to an audience of distinguished lawyers, including the lord chief justice of England, Williams appeared to say (and whatever Williams says, one must always add that he appears to say it, for he rarely makes his meaning sufficiently clear that it is beyond dispute) that elements of sharia law ought to share jurisdiction with British law. As he had just said over the BBC that it seemed "unavoidable" that sharia would become part of British law, his remarks caused a furor.

The words he used were as follows: "It might be possible to think in terms of ... 'transformative accommodation': a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that [to quote the legal theorist Ayelet Shachar] 'power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents.'"

The archbishop was not just saying, or appeared not just to be saying, that people should be allowed to live according to their customs so long as their customs do not conflict with the law, an idea that is, after all, the traditional basis of religious toleration. He is arguing that people should be free to choose the system of laws under which they live, though only on "certain carefully specified matters." It does not seem to have occurred to him that someone has to specify carefully the very matters on which people might be free to choose their jurisdiction: Of necessity, one jurisdiction has to be supreme.

Moreover, he appeared (though perhaps here I might safely say "was") completely ignorant of and unimaginative about the social reality of the people most affected by his argument, namely the Pakistani immigrants and their descendants who form the great majority of Muslims living in Britain. They come from areas of Pakistan and from a social class whose customs are among the most retrograde in the Muslim world, reinforced by the defensive conservatism of those who feel themselves culturally displaced. To give such people jurisdiction over family affairs is to condemn large numbers of women, brought up and educated in Britain, to lives of intolerable servitude, incomparably worse than those of women in the West before the advent of feminism. It should be for the Pakistani immigrant to undergo a transformative accommodation, as indeed many have done, and not for the rest of population to make an accommodating transformation.

The archbishop omitted a cardinal fact from his address, because he was either not honest or not perceptive enough to notice it: namely, that in all the talk of transformative accommodation, it was not necessary to mention the Sikhs, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Confucians, the Bahais, the Jains, and the Orthodox Christians, to say nothing of the Jews, of whom altogether there are many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in Britain. This fact alone, if he were a man of the slightest understanding, should have given him pause.

In Williams's terminally woolly mind there is no such thing as an irreconcilable contradiction, let alone an actual conflict. The lion of polygamy will lie down with the lamb of monogamy, having reached first some kind of ecumenical compromise. "In such schemes ... jurisdictional stakeholders may need to examine the way they operate; a communal/religious nomos [the socially constructed way of ordering experience] has to think through the risks of alienating its people by inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law; and a universalist Enlightenment system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoizing and effectively disenfranchising a minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity."

What all this presumably boils down to is the necessity for creative compromise: the snowballing of adulterers, for example, or community service for apostates.

In most of the commentary in Britain that followed Williams's lecture to the lawyers, much allowance was given him for having been an academic theologian, accustomed to hedging all his statements with the subtle qualifications necessary to attain philosophical truth in a complex world such as ours. Tribute was paid to his erudition and the fact that he reads in eight languages. That one can only glimpse the archbishop's meaning--that is to say, his folly and moral cowardice--as through a glass darkly is attributed to the profundity and density of his thought.

This is far too generous an interpretation. In Williams, postmodernism meets Neville Chamberlain. His way of expressing himself is a symptom of the terrible degeneration of academic and intellectual life in Britain. In an interview with the editor of the Guardian, the liberal British newspaper, he was asked what he thought the public role of the archbishop of Canterbury should consist of. "Should or does," asked the archbishop? Should, replied the editor. Here is the answer from the successor to St. Anselm: "Should. Setting some kind of tonal vision [sic] for the church, the Church of England; pastoral involvement and collaboration with the other bishops. And the Church of England being the way it is, trying to--to find, crystallize some sort of--some sort of moral vision that's communicable to the nation at large. I think those--those are the essentials of it. And I think that--that brings with it the elements of the times being what I once called comic vicar to the nation."