[BRIEF NOTE] On the Rowan Williams affair

[rfmcdonald]

Some brief thoughts (with links!) lie below, organized by theme.

• As has been pointed out in Ontario's 2005 debate on shari'a law, instituting religious law even in partial form leaves believers profoundly vulnerable to abuses. Leaving aside the dubious idea of lending state support to the sorts of clerics who want to control the lives of those parishoners, these sorts of legal structures seem to me effectively immune from challenging review in all but the most hairsplittingly sophistical of ways.


• Anne Applebaum might, or might not, be too far off when she says ("A Craven Canterbury Tale") that Williams' "beliefs are merely an elaborate, intellectualized version of a commonly held, and deeply offensive, Western prejudice: Alone among all of the world's many religious groups, Muslims living in Western countries cannot be expected to conform to Western law -- or perhaps do not deserve to be treated as legal equals of their non-Muslim neighbors."


• Phil Hunt at Cabalamat suggests that "Williams has argued for a system of exceptionalism whereby we atheists (or, as he put it in his speech on Thursday, sterile positivists) must abide by the rule of law while anyone of faith can negotiate whatever opt-outs they wish."


• As expected, the Archbishop of Canterbury's incoherent statements regarding the idea of putting shari'a law into practice in the United Kingdom have angered many in Nigeria, where the eighteen million Anglicans of the Church of Nigeria form a large population in conflict with many of that country's Muslim population. It's particularly tricky since a previous Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, opposed the implementation of shari'a law in Nigeria back in 2001. Schism?


• Thanks to nhw for pointing me to laidnan's analysis of the numerous legal issues with Williams' proposal, here.


• There is a heated debate in the comments at Crooked Timber. (I decided to leave sustained participation in that discussion to web warriors of stouter heart.)


• While tending to agree Johann Hari in a recent issue of The Independent ("Rowan Williams has shown us one thing-- why multiculturalism must be abandoned", I'm struck by his hostility towards "multiculturalism." Does multiculturalism mean something different in the United Kingdom specifically and Europe generally than in Canada, perhaps something like Dutch pillarisation?