Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in The Independent on Rowan Williams monumental gaffe:
What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination and I write here as a modern Muslim woman. He lectures the nation on the benefits of sharia law – made by bearded men, for men – and wants the alternative legal system to be accommodated within our democracy in the spirit of inclusion and cohesion.
Pray tell me sir, how do separate and impenetrable courts and schools and extreme female segregation promote commonalities and deep bonds between citizens of these small isles?
What he did on Thursday was to convince other Britons, white, black and brown, that Muslims want not equality but exceptionalism and their own domains. Enlightened British Muslims quail. Friends like this churchman do us more harm than our many enemies. He passes round what he believes to be the benign libation of tolerance. It is laced with arsenic.
Also in the Independent was this elaborate exegesis by Deborah Orr, which concludes with the words:
I have to confess that it lifts my heart to imagine a legally and religiously recognised board of religious Muslim people, widely supported, and committed to taking a lead in plotting a modern yet Islamic attitude to the rights of women in Britain and around the world. It could be rather wonderful, and is quite a different proposition from the one we have been led to believe that Williams made.
But this is putting the cart so far before the horse that the poor beast can’t even see it. By all means, work to change Islam and evolve Sharia into something which incorporates “a modern yet Islamic attitude to the rights of women”, if such a thing is possible. If you succeed, then come back and talk about whether it has a role to play in supplementing the institutions of the secular state. But don’t presume success. As Yasmin Alhibai-Brown points out, today’s reality is grotesquely different from the naive utopianism of Williams and Orr:
Yet, family disputes, says Dr Williams, would be easier, within sharia. For whom exactly? The polygamous men who live in this country, yes, certainly. Not for their wives who will be told that God intends them to lower their eyes and accept unjust verdicts.
Many will be sent back to bastard husbands or flinty-eyed mullahs will take their children away. In Bradford and Halifax, they may be forbidden to drive or work where men are employed. Adultery will be punished. I don’t think we will have public stonings but violence of some sort will be meted out (it already is) with lawmakers’ backing.
Where in Williams’ dry, academic language was any compassion for these women?