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• Monday, February 25, 2008 02:39 AM

  Disappointed

  "While his tone may be gentler than that of an ayatollah, in the end, like all imams, he is cut from the same cloth."

  Well, here's what Williams said. It doesn't sound all that fundamentalist to me. I don't think you'd find hard-line Islamic clerics talking like this:

  "It’s very important (t)hat you mention there the word ‘choice’; I think it would be quite wrong to say that we could ever licence ... a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal, no way of exercising the rights that are guaranteed to them as citizens in general, so that a woman in such circumstances would have to know that she was not signing away for good and all ... I’m simply saying that there are ways of looking at marital dispute ... which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate." - BBC

  And the long, detailed, complex lecture he gave is virtually ignored by Salil Tripathi, which is odd because it's available online for anyone to read - http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/1575

  Tripathi says:

  "Sharia's militant adherents, on the other hand, claim it applies everywhere, all the time, in all instances. To be fair, Williams did not endorse sharia's criminal law -- which includes stoning, public hanging and amputations. But the problem is that for the fundamentalist Muslim, the sharia is a seamless whole. It does not allow cherry-picking."

  Possibly true, but Williams did not endorse sharia law as defined by Muslim fundamentalists, so I think Tripathi's argument goes out the window here. Williams went out of his way to say otherwise.

  And the idea that he's going to convert people to Anglicanism by appealing to Muslims... Looking at the divisions within the C of E I can't say he's succeeding by taking what's likely seen by christian conservatives as a very liberal stance.

  I'm an atheist and I agreed with what I thought was his central point - forget the hysteria over Islam or religion in general, he just wanted to get it out there that people aren't just defined by state laws and state-determined rights. People have their own lives, their own beliefs and WILL practice them even if they're ostracized and harassed over it. How will it help muslim women if sharia law is applied 'underground', which is what happens when the state ignores the existence of religious law?

  Tripathi asks a good (though somewhat loaded) question; "can a multifaith country require a group of its citizens to live under different rules, many of which might undermine human rights?" William has an answer, but I guess Tripathi and many others didn't like what he had to say. We don't have a choice - "[O]ur social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging." So we have to live with different sets of rules for different cultures - unless we somehow want to force people to live a certain way.

  Sharia-believing muslims are Sharia-believing muslims, even if the governments, journalists and bloggers tell them to stop being Sharia-believing muslims. Williams says he wants to find a way to live with it and find a balance between religious rights and human rights, whereas people livid over his attempt to start a discussion on a controversial topic seem to be the ones who want to force their beliefs on people they see as being wrong.

  I found Haroon Siddiqui's Toronto Star column on the topic a lot more reality-based.

  "Getting past our hysteria over Islam"

  http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/303477

  —joeposts Read joeposts's other letters
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