What did the Archbishop say?

Dr Williams said that it “seems unavoidable” that some aspects of Sharia would be adopted in Britain. He urged that the law do more to accommodate the religious convictions and practices of other faith groups .

Why have his comments prompted such a furore?

Sharia is controversial in the West because – as the Archbishop put it – it calls up “all the darkest images of Islam”. He added: “What most people think they know of Sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishments,” such as stoning, flogging and amputation.

Timing is another factor: his comments come during heightened tensions over fundamentalist Islam’s link with terrorism, along with growing concern that English law, influenced by political correctness, is bending over to favour or accommodate minority ethnic beliefs, practices and sensitivities in a way that it would not for mainstream Christian ones.

Another reason is that Dr Williams, a highly erudite man, expresses his thoughts in nuanced and complex language that is not easily accessible and open to widespread misunderstanding. Many commentators are unclear exactly what he said, and even those who attended his lecture agreed that they would have to go away to digest its contents.

Why is the Archbishop so concerned about Muslims – what about other groups?

Throughout his lecture, the Archbishop was at pains to say that the issues he raised applied equally, for example, to Orthodox Judaism and other faith groups. They affected the rights, for instance, of Roman Catholic adoption agencies not to place babies with gay couples. But as Dr Williams was inaugurating a lecture series on Islam in English law, he focused his arguments on Muslim issues.

Is the Archbishop proposing that Muslims should not have to live under the law of this country – in essence that we have a parallel system of law?

Dr Williams is not saying this. In questions after his lecture he stated unequivocally: “I am not talking about parallel systems but about how the law of the land, most fruitfully and with the least conflicts, can accommodate other practices.” He is raising the question of whether there should be “a higher level of attention to religious identify and communal rights in the practice of the law . . . and a delegation of certain legal functions to the religious courts of a commmunity”. In any case, as several lawyers have said, Sharia cannot “trump the basic fundamentals of English law”, including equal treatment and human rights irrespective of gender or religion.

What could this mean in practice?

He says that individuals should be free to “choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters”, which may include “aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution”. He cites areas of Orthodox Jewish practice, which is the best example for what he seems to have in mind. The Beth Din is a Jewish court that mediates on a range of disputes within the Orthodox community. Sharia councils do the same but they are not formalised or recognised as the Beth Din is. Nor could decisions be taken without regard to the laws of the land. Dr Williams accepts this: people opting into such a forum for the resolution of their dispute cannot be denied the wider rights claimed by others in society, regardless of faith, or punish its members for claiming those rights. But he does not spell out how those rights would be safeguarded in a system whose codes already deprive women, for example, of those basic rights.

How else could aspects of Sharia be adopted, as Dr Williams puts it?

One way, some argue, is by giving Muslims the legal recognition accorded to other faith groups over, for example, marriage and divorce. Jeremy Rosenblatt, a barrister specialising in international child law, points out that the Jewish get, or Orthodox divorce, has been incorporated into the law of this country in the sense that if a husband refused to grant his wife a get so that she could remarry in a synagogue, she could deny him a decree absolute. Dr Williams does not say how the problem of polygamy might be overcome, although he made clear that he does not support it: “Proscriptions in the Koran are prescriptive, not mandatory; no one has to have more than one wife.”

Do Dr Williams’s comments have wider implications?

Yes: he raises many questions that he leaves unanswered. For example: He wants the law to give greater recognition to religious convictions without “blocking access to the liberties guaranteed by the wider society”. He does not say how that balance should be struck, recognise that courts seek to strike that balance daily or make clear that religion is no excuse for breaking the law. He wants Sharia councils to be formalised as a “recognised authority” for religious groups so that when there are clashes with the law the councils would have power to declare whether an “appeal to religious scruple” was vexatious. But he does not anticipate the practical problems, not least that this could engender clashes between such councils and the courts, which would not be bound to accept their rulings. Muslims, he says, should not have to choose between the “stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty”. But where there is a clash, he does not make sufficiently clear that the law should prevail. Worse, he says that he disagrees that there is “one law for everybody”. Greater legal recognition for Muslim marriage or “constructive accommodation” of resolving Muslim marital disputes could, some say, bring Muslim women within the protection of the law. But any alternative divorce court could not be adopted unless consistent with fundamental principles of the law on equality and other human rights.

On balance, has Dr Williams started a much-needed debate or stirred a hornets’ nest?

Dr Williams wants greater tolerance of a wider range of religious beliefs in the eyes of the law. But if the debate is welcome, his specific proposals and the way that he frames them are much less so. In his efforts to secure greater social cohesion, Dr Williams may have done the opposite.