A couple of years ago the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a lecture that elicited, from my colleague Ruth Gledhill, a post entitled “Has the Archbishop gone bonkers?”
This was not a Great Historical Question to Which the Answer was No. Rowan Williams had floated the idea of the adoption of Sharia in some parts of the UK. But it turns out that he was a visionary, for the New Statesman - seriously - has just published a commentary by Sholto Byrnes entitled “Rethinking Islamism II”. He argues:
‘As is sadly so often the case, the nuances in thelecture Rowan Williams delivered at the Royal Courts of Justice in February 2008 failed to have any impact on those whose closed minds alit on the word “sharia” and decided he was talking nonsense yet again. In fact, Dr Williams addressed this point very early on when he quoted Tariq Ramadan’s chapter on sharia in his book Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. “In the West,” writes Ramadan, currently Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford, “the idea of Sharia calls up all the darkest images of Islam...It has reached the extent that many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention of the word”.’
It’s extraordinary that a supposedly left-wing journal should be heedless of this principle and uninterested in the defence of secularism. Though as Nick Cohen will doubtless say in the comments below, it’s not extraordinary at all.
