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 The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has thrown a match at some kerosene-soaked blue touch paper by announcing during an interview on BBC Radio 4's "The World at One" that it "seems unavoidable" that parts of Islamic shariah law will be adopted in the UK. He repeated his comments later at a lecture delivered at the Royal Courts of Justice.
These comments - coming against the back-drop of the Oxford adhaan hysteria and Bishop Nazir-Ali's Muslim "no-go area" comments - have once again focused the spotlight of public censure onto British Muslims as a dangerously subversive group, unwilling or unable to "fit in" with the wider community. The instantaneous chorus of protest that Dr Williams' comments have provoked from just about everyone are almost loud enough to cover the choking sounds of Melanie Phillips, Damian Thompson, Ruth Gledhill and other notorious Islamophobes swallowing their own tongues in convulsions of outrage. There was swift condemnation from the leaders of every major political party and I have no doubt that for the next week every new day will bring out other groups lending their voice to the howls of protest - just as soon as their spokesperson can find synonyms for the word "outrageous". Such universal agreement on any subject is indeed rare and British Muslims could perhaps take some cold comfort in the fact that we have promoted an unusual display of community cohesion - even if it is united against us. If one can ignore this cacophony for a moment, there is one question that remains to be answered - why exactly does Rowan Williams wish to start a debate about implementing shariah in the UK? The first observation to make on Dr Williams' comments is that they are so vague that they can mean everything and nothing - hence the wild supposition that has accompanied them with leader writers in this morning's papers working themselves up into a lather with crazed hypothetical scenarios of implementing hudud punishments on the wider unsuspecting British populace. When one manages to pare down the nebulous rhetoric that is so characteristic of Dr Williams' speeches, we can see that the views he espouses are old hat and he has done no favours for the Muslim community. He called for implementation of the shariah with regards to family law, e.g. divorce. He said that this should be made non-compulsory and that any other aspect of the shariah should not be implemented. All of this is old news. The Shariah Council in Britain has been carrying out these services for over two decades with nary a squeak of protest from the "one law for all" brigade. Throughout all of this debate stands a particularly Jewish elephant in the room. The rabbinical court, the London Beth Din, has been providing Britain's Jewish community with even more extensive family and community law services since 1934. This morning, David Green of the right-wing thinktank Civitas was invited onto BBC Radio 4's TODAY programme to argue that, unlike the Jewish law practiced by the Beth Din, shariah will be unjust to women, to which the BBC nodded with approval. The truth, however, happens to be the complete opposite. When a Jewish man refuses to grant his wife a divorce (the "get"), the Beth Din does not assume the power, as the shariah courts do (e.g. khul'a faskh), to dissolve the marriage. Mr Green thinks the world will not remember the famous case a few years ago when Nick Lowenstein kept his wife waiting to be divorced for 15 years and all the Beth Din in London could do was to issue some statements about the case to the media. We also remember the campaigners who protested outside the Golders Green home of Errol Israel Elias who had denied his wife a religious divorce for more than 40 years. So Mr David Green, please be assured that whilst dear old Auntie Beeb may be fooled by your weasel words and prevarication, there are some people who don't require a thinktank like Civitas to think for us. On the face of it and without knowledge of any other views on Islam offered by Dr Williams, his comments look like a brave and noble gesture to reach out to Muslims in the face of harsh criticism from his own community. However, when one looks at what Williams has been saying about Islam recently, the water muddies considerably. In the past, Rowan Williams and the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali have been playing "good cop, bad cop" with Muslims via their public statements. It has gone something like this: for several years whilst Williams was eulogising Zaki Badawi, hosting Christian-Muslim forums and encouraging trust to build up between Islam and Christianity, Nazir-Ali was accusing Muslims of hypocrisy by harbouring a "dual psychology of victim-hood and domination". In the last year, however, Dr Williams and Nazir-Ali have experienced a meeting of minds on the issue of Islam, and it certainly isn't Nazir-Ali who has changed his views. Gone is the polite equivocation of interfaith dialogue, today's Rowan Williams is now pulling no punches when it comes to describing his ideas on how Muslims need to alter Islam in order to achieve the same level of doubt that the average Anglican has to struggle with on a daily basis. During an interview on BBC Radio 4's Sunday programme in January, Dr Williams warned Muslims against "acknowledging only the bare word of the sacred text, divorced from learning and interpretation". He felt that this was "Islamic primitivism". It seems clear that where we see dangerous innovations that will dilute and corrupt Islam, Rowan Williams sees praiseworthy and necessary reformations that will enable Islam to "engage transformingly with the social and imaginative world." He obviously feels that Islam needs to follow Anglicanism through some sort of a reformation, without realising that this process appears to be encouraging Anglicanism to "morally relativise" itself out of existence. As for any censure of Nazir-Ali's "no-go" comments, there was none to be had. Rather Dr Williams engaged in a bit of elegant prevarication, displaying an ability for double-talk that must make most politicians green with envy. Rather than distance himself from the slurs and accusations foisted on the Muslim community from one of his leading bishops he fudged the whole issue, explaining away any fallout from the comments as "misunderstandings". Most tellingly, when asked about how his suggested level of reform can be brought about in a religion that puts at its centre the unchanging word of God, the Quran, Williams was straight forward: "I think it can only be done by building up trust over quite a long period. Some of the experiences of the last few years internationally and nationally [have] been an exercise in building trust." In this statement we can come to the crux of why I think the Archbishop has made these comments. I feel that he looks upon this episode as "an exercise in building trust" with British Muslims in order to push his own agenda, which is for a reformation of Islam that will introduce doubt and relativism into a religion that provides its followers with moral certainties as the bedrock of their faith. Whilst Rowan Williams may have been speaking sincerely (reformation of religion seems to him to be an inevitability), what I find truly sickening is when some Muslims are more than happy to sign off on the "difficult" bits of Islam for personal expediency. During BBC Radio 4's PM programme, Eddie Mayer interviewed Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, a professional Muslim (as opposed to Muslim professional) who has various links to organisations like the Muslim Parliament, the Muslim Institute and British Muslims for a Secular Democracy (whose board of trustees reads like a Who's Who of "want-to-be-reformers of Islam" including Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Taj Hargey). Those of us with better memories will recall that it is the self-same Ghayasuddin Siddiqui who requested Ayatollah Khomeini to issue the death sentence on Salman Rushdie nearly 20 years ago, and yet using his extraordinary chameleon-like abilities Mr Siddiqui has now metamorphosed into a leading authority on social cohesion and Islamic reformation. During the PM interview, Mr Siddiqui was more than happy to relay that he felt that Islamic law needed revision as it was outdated, and he blamed Muslims for not already revising it due to our collective inability to take any criticism of Islam. What Mr Siddiqui fails to understand is that whilst revision and re-revision may work for the constitution of your local Anglo-Asian Friendship Society, if one believes that the Quran is the word of Allah, then one should take it for granted that Allah's laws do not need revising - especially by the likes of Ghayasuddin Siddiqui. This revisionist thinking appears to have a genetic component with his son Asim Siddiqui - Chairman and Founding trustee of The City Circle - muscling in with some featherweight views about reformation himself. According to Asim Siddiqui, "it is for progressive Muslim scholars to ensure the more liberal and tolerant interpretations that are rooted in the Islamic tradition...become dominant over time." Not since Homer and Bart Simpson entered the world's consciousness has there ever been a father and son team that exudes such fortitude and gravitas. In this entire episode one is also left wondering why it is that when the worldwide Anglican Communion is threatening to implode due to the African bishops' refusal to acknowledge gay priests, the only subject the Archbishop and his sidekick Nazir-Ali can seem to find time to talk about is Islam. Is it a convoluted way of raising awareness of Christianity amongst disenchanted Christians? All in all, the coming week looks like a difficult one for Muslims. Rowan Williams' comments have sparked off a firestorm in the media and Muslims will be put under pressure to either reject the sharia as "brutal and medieval" or be accused of harbouring villainous desires to overthrow British law. I am sure that throughout all of this Rowan Williams will be able to reiterate time and time again that he only suggested this in order to build bridges with Muslims. Eventually he will come out of this episode looking like a sincere but rather naive clergyman whose only wish was to try and help those ingrates from the Muslim community. Whilst I am all for the peaceful co-existence of Islam and Christianity, we need to point out that this can (and has) been achieved without either faith being put under pressure to throw out large tracts of their theology in order to reach some relativistic Nirvana. The best model for community cohesion that I have ever read comes from the Quran, Surah 109, "The Non-believers". "Proclaim 'O non-believers!
Neither do I worship what you worship.
Nor do you worship Whom I worship.
And neither will I ever worship what you worship.
Nor will you worship Whom I worship.
For you is your religion, and for me is mine.'"
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JumahPulses 
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