Now that the dust has settled, we can look more calmly on the issues raised by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sharia speech. He did not call for sharia law to be imposed, and he was well aware of the unequal treatment of women under some forms of sharia and the dangers of coercion. But he did say that sharia had already been recognised to some extent and that further recognition was unavoidable. Moreover, he called for a “market” (his term) in rival jurisdictions in order to have a “transformative accommodation” of both mainstream British law and religious legal traditions. And, paradoxically, he thought that such a choice between secular and religious law would help integrate religious minorities.
When the archbishop said sharia was already with us, he was referring mainly to legal changes to permit sharia-compliant mortgages. However, it would be truer to say that a legal sleight of hand has been constructed to allow Muslims to circumvent the Koranic prohibition of the payment of interest.
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