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Tuesday, 12 February 2008
Rowan
I am frustrated with the reports on Rowan Williams. I am frustrated beyond belief by Christian reactions to his comments on Sharia law. It seems that few people have actually listened to what he had to say and there has been little time given that to the fact that it may actually be worth pondering.
I am annoyed at the fact that at best he has been patronised as a 'lovable academic'. Making being clever an outrage and an offence and dumbing down the respect he has as being sourced in him being a good chap rather than insightful and disciple.
There is a huge challenge in what he says when we come to consider our Christian identities, what governs us and the relationship that has with society and the law. There could be a great deal of pride and a good few links with Baptist history when we consider a religious leader speaking about how people of faith come to live amongst each other in a just society. If we as Christians recognise that we follow Christ and only obey the law when it is in line with Godly values; if we can glimpse at this, then maybe we can see that when we seek to coexist with other faiths under a jurisdiction that is meant to be universally accepted but rooted in church history, we may be looking at a complex issue that needs depth of consideration.
Williams says in his lecture,
'So much of our thinking in the modern world, dominated by European assumptions about universal rights, rests, surely, on the basis that the law is the law; that everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms, so that recognition of corporate identities or, more seriously, of supplementary jurisdictions is simply incoherent if we want to preserve the great political and social advances of Western legality.'
But as Christian we must understand that this will bring us into conflict and as William's said in a radio 4 interview. Christians and Muslims alike do not want a situation where their discipleship in faith causes them to need to square up to 'the law'. That's not beneficial for any of us.
There's huge amounts to unpack in the lecture with nuances abounding and it needs careful consideration. I am disappointed in our communities, that we have joined the media pack in hounding Williams. In joining the scrum of anti Islam feeling and using this to feed the tabloid lynching.
I leave you with some words from his lecture and hope that they encourage thought ,
But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.
But this means that we have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities. .......
But the point of defining legal universalism as a negative thing is that it allows us to assume, as I think we should, that the important springs of moral vision in a society will be in those areas which a systematic abstract universalism regards as 'private' – in religion above all, but also in custom and habit. The role of 'secular' law is not the dissolution of these things in the name of universalism but the monitoring of such affiliations to prevent the creation of mutually isolated communities in which human liberties are seen in incompatible ways and individual persons are subjected to restraints or injustices for which there is no public redress.
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Comments
I agree that the hysteria about what he said was unwarranted, though I think it's partly down to the lack of clarity in his writing and his political naivety (a radio 4 interview is the place to gear down what you're saying and explain it in more friendly terms, not to up the ante - what did he think the reaction was going to be?!!)
But I disagree with the most important parts of his lecture. The most substantive comment he made was about Islamic courts making decisions on what constituted an issue of religious conscience within Islam (should a Muslim be allowed to refuse to handle Bibles if (s)he works in a bookshop, etc) since British legal courts don't really have the expertise to decide on this like they did with the BA woman who wouldn't take off her cross.
This would reify particular strands of Islam and make it more difficult for grassroots Muslims to challenge the wisdom of their elders. It would bureaucratise (comparisons to the CoE, anyone?!) Sharia. Sharia is in fact an incredibly flexible concept which - except in countries where it has become meshed with the state like Saudi Arabia, parts of Nigeria, Sudan etc.
In actual fact I don't think these issues should have much to do with religious conscience at all - the issue is more about workers' rights. Is it so impossible to devise a work schedule for someone in a bookshop who doesn't want to handle Bibles that (s)he should lose her/his job? If not the employer should have to take notice of the workers' concerns because s(he) feels it is important to her/him, regardless of what an Islamic cleric from on high thinks of it.
Secondly, there's an issue Williams didn't really touch on to do with plurality within Islam. Given the number of different interpretations within Shia and Sunni strands of Islam on civil matters, there would be a plethora of different courts whose judgements people Muslims could voluntarily accept. However, suppose two Muslims were to get married and be happy to do that under a particular court's rulings? Does that mean that if they get divorced they have to accept the same court's rulings? What if one partner wants to go to one court for a ruling and one to another (a very likely happening given that different courts will very quickly gain reputations particularly on issues of how wealth is split between men and women upon divorce etc)? Who decides? Furthermore, although Williams says the rights of women would be protected because they would ultimately always have recourse to British law, the threat of social exclusion would in many cases make this a last resort, so I can see a lot of Muslim women accepting worse divorce settlements than they would get in British courts.
As Baptists I think we should be arguing for a clean break between law (as pertaining to nation states) and religion. Part of the problem is that we don't really have a concept of law as distinct from the state, whereas of course most Muslims do. We should be accepting of religious law where it is separate from the state and basically a voluntary code or guideline. But where that is the case we DON'T need to legislate to allow people to follow that - as it is already separate from the state.
This is certainly a difficult issue and arguably I should pull the plank out of my own eye before criticising Rowan Williams' writing for being unclear!
Posted by: tim f | Wednesday, 13 February 2008
Thanks Tim,
It's taken me a while to get back because I'm so busy at the min.
You say he was naive in his radio 4 interview that that is the space for gearing down rather than upping the anti so to speak. I struggle with this. A lot of the media seem to take issues to a lowest common denominator rather than dealing with complex issues. I don't actually think this is a good thing. Alistair Campbell talks a lot in his diaries about his frustration with the British Media being unwilling to engage with issues and wanting to focus on gossip and personality. It's easier to label William's as a lovable academic than engage with the issues in his essay. Perhaps the media has the responsibility to represent what he says well rather than him having the responsibility to dumb down and sound bite?
As for where you disagree with him. I'm not too sure that you do disagree with him. You say that issues should relate more to workers rights. When does a person of faith separate their work from a sense of who they are in God? This then leads us back into a discussion on how individuals will relate to each other and the law. To quote,
'To recognise that citizenship itself is a complex phenomenon not bound up with any one level of communal belonging but involving them all'
You also say that Williams doesn't deal with the 'plurality within Islam'. It is precisely the plurality within society though that this essay seeks to start talking about. It is because we are in a situation of plurality we need to engage with these issues. Williams says,
‘Is it not both theoretically and practically mistaken to qualify our commitment to legal monopoly?’
As for separation between law and religion. I find that surprisingly niave from you. So much so that I can't really bring myself to qualify why. We exist inextricably within a system of law, we are shaped by it as well as seek to shape it.
Williams starts off by saying that hysteria builds whenever Sharia is mentioned it seems to me that that is exactly what has happened with too few people engaging at all with the actual issues raised.
Posted by: Kez | Thursday, 21 February 2008
I agree with you about mainstream media - but that's the way it is and we can't ever rely on them to take their responsibility seriously. Sometimes we have to go with it to get our message across and sometimes we have to ignore it and build our own media, but Williams seemed surprised by the reaction, which I thought was naive.
"When does a person of faith separate their work from a sense of who they are in God?"
Never, of course. But that is exactly why I phrased the issue as being one of workers' rights. Each person of faith is going to have to struggle with what their faith means in each situation and that might mean not carrying bibles for one Muslim and might not mean it for another. If it's an issue of religious conscience as Rowan Williams sees it, then the state has to decide what constitutes an issue of religious conscience and what doesn't. In that case it's easy to see why he wants British courts to refer to Sharia courts for that kind of decision. But that means the decision on the validity of each individual's decision on how their faith shapes their actions is taken by a court authorised by the state, and not by the person of faith themselves. With my framework the person of faith can make their own decision because they have autonomy within a sphere of possible actions. So in the case mentioned the employer has a responsibility to make sure the person of faith's wishes are complied with unless that is completely impossible (in which case they cannot reasonably do the job either using Williams' paradigm or mine).
On pluralism, I agree that Rowan Williams deals with the issue of a diversity of faiths, but I don't think he adequately deals with the issue of diversity within faiths. I think that the informal methods most devout Muslims already use to seek guidance on civil aspects of Sharia deal better with that diversity than a clumsy attempt to formalise and codify them.
"We exist inextricably within a system of law, we are shaped by it as well as seek to shape it."
Yes, certainly - just the same as all of our major cultural influences. I can't see how that is an argument against keeping religion and the law as far apart as possible though - feel free to elaborate if you want to get into that area of discussion (maybe not though, it's a pretty wide topic!). I suspect we're talking at cross-purposes and are actually talking about different sets of relations.
I agree with some of the more general paragraphs in Williams' lecture, insofar as they are communitarian rather than liberal. But his practical application seems to me to be massively flawed.
Posted by: tim f | Thursday, 21 February 2008
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