The Archbishop’s bomb

I believe the Archbishop has done something enormously courageous, perhaps without realizing it.  He’s dropped a bomb on multi-culturalism.

With his huge, dense speech on the shariah at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday night, he has woken the country from its self-delusion.  There have been whole university departments devoted to what’s called ‘comparative law’ in UK for twenty years at least, and a huge amount published on it – but no one pays attention to religion.  It’s because of secularization that the ABC’s speech has come as such a shock.

He is right that there is a system of parallel or plural legal systems already operative in UK - and not just Muslim.  All religions develop legal systems, though they all operate differently and to different ends.  Now we can no longer ignore the cherished secular myth of uniformity.  So what do we do now?  Do we ignore the fact as we have done for so long?  A cult of silence has been in operation for thirty years, to use SOAS Law Professor Werner Menski’s potent phrase.  Purposive non-discourse, he once said memorably, has been government policy a generation.  It’s what’s allowed all kinds of human rights abuses to get rooted.  And it has also allowed the rest of the country to operate a kind of silent apartheid,  a pretence that minority cultures would have no impact on the rest of us.

What do those who have reacted in such high dudgeon to the Archbishop think should be done about informal shariah?  What world are they living in?  Go on ignoring it?  Hardly.  Ban it ?  Surely not!  If you do that, you ban Muslims!  To be Muslim is to follow some form of the shariah.  So what’s left is to incorporate it – and so achieve a certain right to regulate its excesses, although the ABC did not quite put it that way. What he said was: 

The role of ’secular’ law is not the dissolution of [religious loyalties] 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. 

What the ABC is advocating is that secular positive law should recognize its own humanity in roots that are also religious – in this case Christian – and stop pretending it has the right to be so prescriptive, abolutising and uniform.   And anti-religious.  The famous ‘neutrality’ for which the law strives is more often a denial of difference than an affirmation of mercy and justice.

It was a brilliant, if sometimes opaque lecture – and a PR catastrophe.  Given the context of a cult of silence, the Archbishop probably would have done better not to accept this invitation, and thereby appear out of the blue to be suddenly sanctioning the shariah law.  It’s the last straw for many professional archbishop bashers. Given the way the lectures have been pitched it was a trap – and he’s walked right into it.

But there will be no ignoring the reality of migration any more.