MUST READ: ALLAH, QUEEN & COUNTRY

Allah, Queen, and Country
Sharia gets an unlikely boost in the UK.
by Joseph Loconte

LAST WEEK THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, generated a tsunami of criticism by welcoming the partial adoption of Islamic Sharia law in the United Kingdom. "If what we want socially," said Rowan Williams, "is a pattern of relations in which a plurality of diverse and overlapping affiliations work for a common good . . . it seems unavoidable." The only truly unavoidable thing was that an apology from the archbishop would be forthcoming. Whether the continued decline in the influence of Christianity in Britain is also unavoidable remains an open question.

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Many liberals and secularists view the entire effort to accommodate religious belief with disdain. The Guardian complains that the latest flap proves that religion "would be better entirely excluded" from public life. Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens lauds the democratic work of "centuries of civilization"--yet fatuously assumes that strident secularism did the heavy lifting.

Nonsense. Just recall the history-making Somerset Case of 1771, in which a British judge used a writ of habeas corpus to free an American slave brought to England from Virginia. Buoyed by evangelicals and other abolitionists, Lord William Mansfield declared slavery an "odious" condition unknown to English law and set James Somerset free. British law trumped the American practice--a bracing defense of political equality, inseparable from the biblical moral tradition. "[It] is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine," writes political philosopher Jeremy Waldron. "It is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God."

The difficult fact is that Islam has yet to show convincingly that its conception of God supports the human-rights ideals of liberal societies--from freedom of religion to the rights of women. The question that remains, the question ignored by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is how his Sharia scheme could possibly hasten this great democratic task.



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1) Allah, Queen, and Country