Posted on 02/25/2008 10:36:41 AM PST by Mr. Silverback
There are an estimated 1.6 million Muslims in Great Britain. By some estimates, more people attend mosque than go to Anglican churches every week. Judging by recent comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it is easy to see why.
As most of you by now know, Archbishop Rowan William said in a recent interview that the “UK has to ‘face up to the fact’ that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.” He left no doubt who those “citizens” are: British Muslims.
So according to Williams, British Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” Instead, in the tradition of having your cake and eating it too, he proposes finding “a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law”—in other words, sharia.
British Muslims could choose to have “marital” or “financial” disputes resolved in sharia courts. Sharia courts in Britain? At first I thought the Archbishop misspoke.
But it turns out, no. He calls this “supplementary jurisdiction” unavoidable. He compared it to accommodating Christians in areas like abortion or gay adoption.
With all due respect to the Archbishop, there is no such parallel. The only thing that is unavoidable here is his failure to see sharia as it is practiced in the real world, as opposed to in seminars. As the Asia Times columnist “Spengler” put it, Williams is conceding “a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England.”
In real-world Muslim communities throughout Europe, coercion is so commonplace “that duly-constituted governments there” no longer wield justice among its citizens. The imams do. And where would the Archbishop draw the line? At husbands beating their wives for wearing Western clothes or maybe stoning a woman accused of adultery?
Nor will, as Williams hopes, permitting sharia on British soil aid social cohesion. On the contrary, Williams’s fellow bishop, Michael Nazir-Ali, recently spoke about what he calls “no-go zones” in Muslim communities where Christians dare not enter. As a result of death threats, bishop Nazir-Ali and his family require police protection.
Nazir-Ali, whose father had to leave Pakistan after converting to Christianity, told the UK Telegraph that sharia is “in tension” with “fundamental aspects” of Anglo-American law. That is because our “legal tradition” is “rooted in the quite different moral and spiritual vision deriving from the Bible.” This crucial difference seems to have escaped the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The West’s greatest contribution to civilization has been the rule of law, the bulwark of freedom, captured in Anglo-American jurisprudence. Now a ranking religious official proposes compromising that with a theocratic church rule? Please.
Williams’s comments are a tragic sign of the Church’s weakness. We fawningly respond to Islamic overtures for dialogue, even as we see Christians being persecuted in Muslim nations—and sharia law being imposed on others right in our own backyards.
This weakness is the stuff that empty churches are made of.
And certainly the stuff of an empty gospel.
There are links to further information at the source document.
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If they started preaching the true gospel of Jesus Christ, they’d need several services a week to hold all the seekers of truth! How stupid these church fathers are.
Most of the churches these days are not religious institutions, but political institutions.
And when will I see this happen?
The only way to deal with Muslims (short of expulsion) is to adopt aggressive secularization a la Kemal Ataturk.
Why?
I’d rather be ruled by druids than Muslims or the abyssmally foolish Archbishop of Canterbury.
Good point...and it should be noted that William's vision of accommadating sharia wouldn't be like accommodating Christians in abortion or gay adoption; it would be like accommadating gay-bashing as long as the thug doing the bashing was a Christian, or did it in an area that had mostly Christian residents.
It may be...and I see us on the same track. Something needs to change.
I didn’t write that, dad.
Well, we’ll see about that. God’s not through with them yet either.
“My problem is not so much that Brits are secular, its that they think that “human rights and democracy” are a great substitute religion. “
Well said.
The Archbishop of Canterbury IS a druid! Seriously, he’s a member of some silly club called the “Druids” that goes out and has silly rites here and there. That may explain a few things about him...
Britain is a post-Christian nation. Nevertheless, they are still “infidels.”
“If everything isn’t black and white, I say, “Why the hell not?””
John Wayne quote
All you Christians out there, does this ring a bell? “Stand up, Stand up for Jesus, you soldiers of the cross...” This just isn’t happening because good Biblical teaching and doctrine is being replaced by feel-good morality.
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