Well this is some­what heart­en­ing; it seems like pretty much every­one agrees with me on the recent state­ment from Dr Rowan Wil­li­ams, that the UK should adopt aspects of Sharia Law.

This also neatly demon­strates some­thing I’ve been say­ing for a while; The UK really is a much more sec­u­lar nation that the US, state reli­gion not­with­stand­ing. Brit­ish people tend to know this, but some (by no means all) Amer­ic­ans seem to labour under the impres­sion that the Church here is actu­ally wields some real power. This is the Arch­bishop of Can­ter­bury, the head of the Church of Eng­land, and yet pretty much every­one in gov­ern­ment has come out and pub­licly cri­ti­cised him for speak­ing rub­bish. Can you ima­gine the US pres­id­ent speak­ing out against a reli­gious leader like this?

I know it sounds insane, but it’s true.

The BBC is report­ing on an inter­view he gave, in which he argued that many Muslims don’t relate to Brit­ish law and would seek to prac­tice Sharia Law any­way. To avoid this going under­ground, or being a source of cul­tural ten­sions, he thinks we should imple­ment “aspects” of Sharia Law in a con­trolled way, in order to “main­tain social cohe­sion.” It sounds sort-​​of reas­on­able on the face of it, until you ask how exactly it’s going to main­tain social cohe­sion, and remem­ber exactly what par­tic­u­lar wedge this could be thin end of. Dr Wil­li­ams know this, and he says:

nobody in their right mind would want to see in this coun­try the kind of inhu­man­ity that’s some­times been asso­ci­ated with the prac­tice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme pun­ish­ments, the atti­tudes to women as well

But what he either doesn’t know or doesn’t say is that you can’t draw that dis­tinc­tion in a use­ful way. This is what Sharia Law is about, it’s not some optional extra that sits on top of a bunch of more accept­able legal con­structs. Of course there is more to Sharia Law than oppress­ing non-​​Muslims and bru­tal­ising women, and it would (argu­ably) be pos­sible to imple­ment some of the less offens­ive aspects of it in the UK — but that wouldn’t help. And this is why it would have no pos­it­ive effect on social-​​cohesion: No one who can’t relate to the Brit­ish legal sys­tem is hav­ing a prob­lem with the way it handles fin­an­cial mat­ters or what bank hol­i­days we have; that feel­ing of ali­en­a­tion doesn’t stem from minor admin­is­trat­ive details, it comes from a fun­da­mental dis­con­nect with the basis of the law. Brit­ish law is, by and large, sec­u­lar, egal­it­arian and lib­eral; Sharia Law is none of those things; it’s reli­giously motiv­ated, pat­ri­archal and author­it­arian, and those are exactly the fea­tures that the Muslims who can’t abide by UK law want to see intro­duced. Mak­ing a few token ges­tures won’t appease those people, but it will give them a sense of momentum and a legal pre­ced­ent for Sharia Law being enacted in the UK. I don’t know about Dr Wil­li­ams, but that’s not a situ­ation I want to find myself in.

Actu­ally, I think I do know about Dr Wil­li­ams. I’m sure he doesn’t want Sharia Law to make sig­ni­fic­ant head­way in the UK — he’s a civ­il­ised man, after all — but, as is so often the case with the reli­gious, he sees any reli­gion as bet­ter than no reli­gion, to the point that he thinks any reli­gion is due spe­cial privilege:

What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-​​off, where the law squares up to people’s reli­gious consciences.

Per­son­ally, I’d like to reph­rase that second para­graph as “What we don’t want either, is I think, a stand-​​off, where people’s reli­gious con­sciences lead them to claim spe­cial priv­ilege to break the law that applies to every­one else.” But then, Dr Wil­li­ams doesn’t believe in the law as I under­stand it:

An approach to law which simply said — there’s one law for every­body — I think that’s a bit of a danger

OK — what? What is the law if it doesn’t apply to every­body? It’s noth­ing more than a tool of oppres­sion, and an edu­cated man like Dr Wil­li­ams should be ashamed of him­self for even sug­gest­ing it. The law, one law, must apply to all people equally, oth­er­wise we have no claim to be a lib­eral, free soci­ety, and we might, as Dr Wil­li­ams sug­gests, resign ourselves to being on the inex­or­able path to Sharia Law.

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Stand­ard dis­claimer: I have noth­ing against the vast major­ity of Muslims, and have a lot of respect for many of them. It’s the bar­baric miso­gyn­ists who believe that women are prop­erty to be used and abused as men see fit, that it’s per­fectly reas­on­able to behead “the enemies of Islam,” and (most import­antly) that the “law of God” is the only one to which they are beholden, that I’m talk­ing about here.

Apo­lo­gies for the lack of updates recently; I’ve been busy enjoy­ing a ver­it­able cor­nu­copia of symp­toms for the past couple of weeks, and haven’t really been up to writ­ing about much, even though there’s been plenty going on:

• The Texas Edu­ca­tion Agency has fired Chris Comer, a staff mem­ber of nine years, for send­ing an email announ­cing a talk by a Bar­bara For­rest, a prom­in­ent critic of ID. The inter­net has been buzz­ing, and For­rest her­self has writ­ten on how this proves her point that ID, rather than being a sci­entific pos­i­tion, is an attempt to force the reli­gious right’s agenda into the classroom (and the pub­lic con­scious­ness) through power-​​politics and out­right bul­ly­ing. Just remem­ber kids; it’s the Dar­win­ists who have a shady global con­spir­acy to sup­press the oppos­i­tion and get people fired just for sup­port­ing ID.

• The Brit­ish gov­ern­ment has given up all pre­tense at seek­ing con­sensus and is for­cing through legis­la­tion that will increase the time “sus­pec­ted ter­ror­ists” can be held without charge. If you’re a UK cit­izen, you can register your dis­pleas­ure by sign­ing this peti­tion. Please take the time; this is a hugely import­ant issue that bears dir­ectly on our most import­ant human rights.

• Some poor teacher was arres­ted, tried, jailed and then depor­ted for call­ing a Teddy Bear Muhammad. Local people took excep­tion to the fact that she wasn’t executed and took to the streets in protest. Gov­ern­ments the world over seem not to notice that whenever a group of people go bat­shit insane and start demand­ing inno­cent people are beheaded for some utterly trivial slight to their cul­ture, those people always seem to be Muslim. The Brit­ish pub­lic seems not to notice that the laws Gillian Gib­bons were arres­ted under bear a strik­ing resemb­lance to the laws our gov­ern­ment put in place a few years back with the express pur­pose of arrest­ing Muslims for mak­ing utterly trivial slights against our cul­ture.

That’s prob­ably enough for tonight. I should be back to a more reas­on­able posting-​​schedule now, so if I think of any­thing else I missed, I’ll sneak it into a future post.

From the BBC:

Mem­bers of Scot­tish Muslim groups and mosques are to gather in Glas­gow later for a rally against terrorism.

I think this is a import­ant for two reas­ons. Firstly it sends a mes­sage to the ter­ror­ists that they do not have the sup­port of the main­stream Muslim com­munity. I doubt this will make a dif­fer­ence at all to the real hard-​​liners (they don’t con­sider the main­stream Muslim com­munity to be Muslim any­way,) but if it widens the gap between the main­stream and the extreme, then it will, hope­fully, make it a little less likely that people cross that gap. Any meas­ure that pre­vents even one per­son being con­vinced that the best way to express their faith is to blow them­selves up in a crowded street is worth pur­su­ing in my book.

The second reason this mat­ters, is that it under­scores, in the wider public’s mind, that there’s a dif­fer­ence between “Muslim” and “ter­ror­ist”. It’s shock­ing that Muslim com­munit­ies should have to make that dis­tinc­tion to the rest of us, and I think the reason it’s taken so long for some­thing like this to hap­pen prob­ably has a lot to do with mod­er­ate Muslims assum­ing that it’s a given that they don’t sup­port (and are not) the extrem­ists. Unfor­tu­nately, many people see the con­tinu­ing silence (bar­ring the odd state­ment by mem­bers of the Muslim Coun­cil of Great Britain) of the wider Muslim com­munity as tacit approval of ter­ror­ist activ­it­ies. It’s true that the rest of us don’t have to march and demon­strate to show our dis­ap­proval (although maybe we should; it never hurts to make sure every­one knows how you feel,) and it’s equally true that the entire Muslim com­munity should not have to feel respons­ible for a few loon­ies who hap­pen to share their reli­gion. But the point is that as long as those loon­ies are shout­ing loudly that that reli­gion demands they kill them­selves and the rest of us in the name of Allah, then the mod­er­ate com­munity has a respons­ib­il­ity to tell us (and the loon­ies) in just as uncer­tain terms that is demands no such thing. If people don’t hear the oppos­ing view, is is sur­pris­ing that after a while, they start to believe what the extrem­ists are telling them? And that’s exactly what this march is; it’s the lar­ger Muslim com­munity of Scot­land stand­ing up and say­ing “No. That’s enough. This viol­ence is wrong, it’s anti-​​Islamic, we won’t con­done it, and it has to stop. Now.” Make no mis­take, this will drive a wedge between the mod­er­ate and extreme Muslim com­munit­ies, but that’s import­ant too; by being seen to dis­tance them­selves from the fringe, the main­stream will be per­ceived as closer to the rest of us (which is where they’ve always been,) and that sort of coming-​​together, that sort of unity in the face of adversity, is exactly what this coun­try needs. For everyone’s good.