Into the Wardrobe

I know we've had a lot of Tom Wright recently but I found this by far the most helpful thing I've read on this. I got the Guardian the day after this blew up and found it said nothing clearly, while the Sun was hysterical:



What do people reckon?[/url]

Here are links to four articles that I thought were sensible comments on the words of this very stupid Archbishop. (That is really the kindest thing that can be said about him.)









Many people have said that the rules of Sharia are alien to our culture. My worry is that they are not so alien. Some of the cruelties and injustices of Islam existed not so long ago in English law and some of the traditional religious rulings are as much Christian as Islamic.

Executions, public torture and the cutting off of hands for petty crimes were once common in England. The Sharia ruling that, in the event of a divorce, the father must always have custody of the children was English law in the nineteenth century. According to strict Islamic law a woman may not leave the house without a close male relative but, until relatively recently, the Catholic Church taught that a married woman should not leave the house without her husband's permission.

Our modern British law and our modern British religion are the result of the courage and determination of many people over a long time. The Archbishop's speech will make it easier to deny modern rights to Muslims and perhaps, in the long run, to all of us.

Further to kbrowne: the position of married women under English law was the system of "coverture", described by the legal authority Blackstone as: "My wife and I are one, and I am he." Mothers were not even legal parents of their children until 1839, and married women had no control of their own property until 1870, and even then had to wait 12 years for full rights - none of which happens under sharia. Still, things have changed since then.

Thanks for the links. That's the kind of thing I was looking for and couldn't find the day after. I'm still not sure what exactly Williams was proposing though. But Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Johann Hari are always worth listening to - and it's nice to have the Spectator there giving the view from the right.

Of course we do; but simply raises the question of when these identities become legally significant. In our legal system in practice the identity woman is held to have greater significance in relation to childcare than citizen whereas under Sharia in the same context the identity man has greater significance. Now we have two legal systems tackling the issue of divorce one which is trying to be equitable but actually favoring women and one which is also trying, so we are led to believe, to be equitable (there are plenty of Islamic texts which talk of the equality of the sexes) but is actually favoring men. Both these systems are drawing on cultural factors which feed into a metajusticial framework which is ultimately religious in its orientation.