Friday, February 08, 2008

Rowan and Sharia

Of course, the moment you say 'Sharia Law', everybody thinks of severed hands, public floggings and adulterers hung from cranes. I am sure this is silly, but it is the ways things are and it is the reason why Rowan Williams is now in such trouble. I suspect what he actually meant was pretty harmless even if wrong, but hysteria is the defining characteristic of our public realm.

14 comments:

  1. The lecture in which the Archbishop's suggestions was first made is indeed rather more complex than the silly headlines produced from it. It is available here: http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575

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  2. Is it cos I has a beard?

    well, I've never trusted him anyway. what's the word? sinister.

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  3. Northern Ireland already has something called Community Restorative Justice for 'communities' that don't trust the courts or police. The criminal depredations of the former Provos don't come within its remit. Do we really want to go down that route here? Williams is 'clever stupid' and over-impressed by a book on the 'market state' by Philip Bobbitt which he keeps citing. Having presided over the disintegration of the CoE over gay rights, he now wants to wreak havoc on the COMMON law. This is not about Muslims wanting the equivalent arbitration mechanisms already enjoyed by Orthodox Jews (who accept the primacy of common law) but about ideologues and activists seeking to establish territorial exclaves where the Green banner prevails. Treason of the clerks and time to emigrate indeed.

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  4. We went through all this over here. A few years ago, in a fit of multicultural tolerance, a provincial government was all set to authorize family law arbitrations under sharia law. It was stopped at the last minute by frantic Muslim women demanding to know whether they were out of their minds.

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  5. Entirely agree, Cap'n. Williams classically 'clever stupid' (and, I think, a good man - which makes matters worse). Anyone who saw the Ch4 documentary Divorce Sharia Style will have seen for themselves a legal system run entirely by (mostly elderly) men entirely for men, and been appalled - and this film was intended to show the positive side of Sharia pratice at its most benign.

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  6. Pure intelligence, which I'm sure the ABoC has in abundance, is a pretty useless commodity unless it can be harnessed to awareness and character. We all know people who are so intelligent they can't tie their own shoelaces.

    Now if he had any practical intelligence it might have given him the foresight to realise, no matter how well meaning, how this sounds. Instead he somehow though talking on Radio 4 was the same as having a chat at High Table in Balliol.

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  7. What a piece of naivete in a public figure. As if he need pay no account to what's out there in the political domain: symbols and meanings, his own actions, the reaction to them by others; you know...

    But what is the CofE for? Is it a post-modern sect? I am reminded of the Smith and Jones sketch where they say Anglicanism is a broad church and that satanism can be tolerated.

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  8. ''But what is the CofE for?''

    I believe it was a way to fill out forms in the 1950s if you didn't actually go to church.

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  9. Is it possible that the schism that destroys Anglicanism will be between the faction that wants to institute sharia law and the one that backs the Talmud?

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  10. After reading more details, I agree that what he meant was more harmless than it is being protrayed. I'm not so sure about hysteria being the "defining characteristic of our public realm," though.

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  11. There is at the moment a climate where anything a churchman says which could be taken out of context, will.
    The Pope, in Munich & in Rome just a few days ago, now Canterbury are on the receiving end of an agenda which seems to be designed to shut them up completely. Nothing in the texts, when read, could be described as problematic. The problem, if such, is in where and for whom these lectures were given. The where and at what level these talks were pitched.

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  12. I blame you, Bryan, for encouraging him. Look at what you said last September: "Williams, after four rather hesitant years in the job, has plainly decided to harden his public posture...his new, tougher position is better...He has seen, I suspect, that there is more, not less, for the Church to say in a complacently secular society."

    And what a good job he is making of it!

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  13. When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him – Jonathan Swift

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  14. His comments have been completely blown out of proportion. All he suggested was that parts of Sharia Law COULD be used.

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