Sharia madness

'The day the Archbishop became a hero'
Muslim News, 29 February, 2008.

Hysteria is a funny old word. In ancient Greece it referred to a malady of losing your marbles that was exclusive to women. That is why it’s funny that the events following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s crucial mistake of making an intellectual speech with the word ‘sharia’ in it to an audience that included the Daily Mail amongst its members, resembled the knee-jerk reaction more characteristic of men. Like a virus that starts off harmlessly in one place (possibly at the Daily Mail table) then suddenly appears every place all at once before you know it, the deliberate misjudgment of the delicately nuanced utterances of the Archbishop spiraled so scarily out of control that you just know someone somewhere had unsavoury fantasies of a crucifixion.

The minute he said ‘sharia’, it was too late for poor Dr Rowan Williams. Cue the clichés of hysterical reporting and scare-mongering that were so clichéd you don’t even need me to list them. It is hard to imagine any of those hacks mulling over the finer points of pluralistic jurisdiction by candle light before proceeding onto their insightful analyses that would appear on the front pages the next day. No one is pretending to really understand the entirety of what Dr Williams was addressing: the depths of the complex issues that evoked memories of echoing and dimly lit University lecture theatres couldn’t even be fully grasped by an ordinary journalist, so no one will ever know why the Daily Mail thought it had a good chance.

The Archbishop’s speech at the Royal Courts of Justice was addressing a largely theoretical politico-legal debate theoretically. He left many open ended questions, in fact, the whole speech was a bunch of questions concerning how pluralism can be brought into a new age, where, instead of sticking to a stringent post- enlightenment paradigm of jurisprudence, the law should be a dynamic dialogue between all stakeholders, until a mutual understanding and equilibrium can be reached that allows for different views within the boundaries of enshrined universal principles that everyone can agree on. Unfortunately, this wasn’t understood the first time, so the Archbishop’s website had to translate it into ‘English’.

The Archbishop’s speech wasn’t about Islam. It wasn’t even about religion. It was about how a lot of different people can live together so everyone is happy - to oversimplify it drastically. Given that the most fervent minority offshoots of today are religious groups (and not football fans), and given that Islam is the largest minority religion in the UK, the speech inevitably used religion, and Islam more specifically, as a case in point of how to balance different minority views in our endless quest for universalism.

Now, I’m not expecting the media to understand that (can you imagine the tabloid headline ‘archbishop wants everyone to be happy’?), even though they can. It’s just that they don’t even want to, even if they could. Tabloids will be tabloids, I guess. Yet, the ‘qualities’ on the other side of the journalistic spectrum did exactly the same thing (as for putting headlines like ‘adopt sharia in the UK’ in inverted commas when they clearly weren’t quotes, well, both tabloid and quality were equally guilty). The Sun’s almost witty feature that took two pages to scream that the Archbishop’s speech was a “victory…for terrorism” was echoed in a more sophisticated veneer, and somewhat smaller font, in The Telegraph, which argued that this new controversy was going to be ammunition for extremists.

Commentary in The Times even lamented the loss of Christian Sovereignty. One columnist started off on the premise that the Archbishop was wrong to call Britain a secular country, when in fact, the whole point of his speech was to emphasise the exact opposite (which leaves you wondering whether even 2 per cent of our journalists even bothered to read the speech). She then went on to lament the loss of Anglican Church sovereignty that was slowly being encroached by a growing pluralism, to the extent of undermining the monopolistic authority of the current State religion. This echoed the Bishop of Rochester’s second most stupid statement of the year: that British law was based on Judeo-Christian values, and only those values. A far cry indeed from the Archbishop’s claim that modern liberal democratic law was based on the values of all three Abrahamic faiths.

The Archbishop got the attention of the world with his heroic daring, especially countries like France. But as the ultra-secular states looked on with amusement, they were hubristically unaware that the Archbishop was at least a century ahead of their childish militant atheism. Some pessimists may have taken issue with what seemed like an almost sickeningly utopian vision from Archbishop. But no matter how soppy, the last thing such depth of vision from such an important public and spiritual figure could ever be is “unhelpful”.

Some of Dr Williams’s fellow Church leaders complained about his erudition, saying that it wasn’t befitting of clergy or of a public figure. Some of the more intellectual media waxed philosophical and said that the Archbishop should have been a bit more tactful and that this was public suicide. But the Archbishop did not only challenge the feral beasts of the simplistic media hacks, he dared to be erudite in a public atmosphere that is so averse to critical debate. If anything, we need to bring erudition to the general public, not stuff it into a University lecture theatre where only the privileged few have access to it. The Archbishop was not only visionary like a true leader, but withstood the barrage of enemy arrows, like a true hero.