Is there something special about Muslims that makes them exempt from criticism? Imagine 20 years ago if an Archbishop said that the application of Apartheid for immigrants from South Africa was unavoidable.
Please, let’s calm down.
This system is found India. Basically, when you get married you choose the set of civil rules the two of you would like to follow regarding divorce, inheretence, children, etc. Nobody is getting stoned to death and nobody is falling down any slippery slopes. I wouldn’t call India the exemplar of inter-religious unity, but they are a thriving democracy.
I believe this system is also found in reverse in some Muslim countries. Christians are able to buy alcohol, resolved domestic disputes using their own system, etc.
What the United Kingdom truly needs is to get rid of a system of almost entirely secular laws and replace it with one in which some different laws apply depending on your religion.
Great idea. Big advance.
How many people do I have to put together with views similar to my own before we can get special laws to be passed that exempt us from laws that we don’t like?
Or does this only apply to religious views?
More evidence that Daniel Pipes is simply the international equivalent of David Duke or William L. Pierce. Despite the claims of numerous hate sites (all of which take their information from a couple of blogs and essays that Pipes wrote), the Zones Urbaines Sensibles are not Muslim enclaves where the French government fears to tread. They are, in fact, the neighborhoods identified as suffering extreme poverty (many–but not all–of which are populated primarily by immigrants from North Africa who tend to be Muslim). They have been identified by the French government as areas that need special assistance to eliminate poverty. It is very true that in several of them, the (anti-police) riots of 2006 saw a lot of disaffected youth targeting police, purportedly in response to the constant harrassment the youth claim the police visit on them. While there are, indeed, 751 ZUS neighborhoods; it is simply a lie, promulgated by Pipes and spread by the cretins who follow him, that there are 751 places in France where there is no law except Sharia. (As with the projects in many U.S. cities, quite a few of the ZUS are run by gangs, but those gangs tend to be quite secular although some of them are liable to wrap themselves in a cloak of Islam to try to garner sympathy from other sources.)
This Wikipedia article (translated from the original French) describes the ZUS with a link to this fuller explanation (also translated).
Original articles are Zone Urbaine Sensible and Politique de la ville
It’s nice to have someone from Ohio tell us what, in fact, is happening in the poor French suburbs. That’s what’s great about the SDMB.
You’re right - I still consider it to have been an inappropriate and unhelpful comment, but wasn’t intended with anything like the significance I gave to it.
What he seems to be doing is trying to talk about religious laws in a way that only a religious scholar can do. And in his position, he perhaps doesn’t see such a clear distinction between our secular system and the Christian history from which it arose.
Have you read any of this thread, let alone the Archbishop’s actual words?
Perhaps if you’d read the thread, you would have seen one of the numerous places where I pointed out the volitional nature of Williams’ proposals (which, you might even have noticed, I don’t even really agree with). So no, I do not advocate one law for Muslims, another for the rest of us. Just so we’re clear, nor do I advocate a system of civil law based on the ritual violation of hedgehogs, or on messages derived by playing Noel Edmonds chatshows backwards at double speed (although this is a much better way to watch them).
I am aware that at present any two people can resolve disputes extra-judicially in whatever manner they choose. Indeed, you can already nominate a mediation service of your choice and have the outcome be held as binding (assuming both parties agree), so to that extent the nightmare scenario has already come to pass. The Sharia Council already dispenses advice and mediation services for Islamic resolution of disputes and family issues. As Szlater notes, what the Archbishop is really trying to do is make Muslims feel more included in a national dialogue, while simultaneously attempting to break down some of the cruder preconceptions about what Sharia actually is (as so neatly typified by the OP). Inasmuch as he appears to have failed I suppose he might reasonably draw some criticism, but since his failure is a result of the media frenetically perpetuating the very stereotypes he was seeking to address, I find it rather hard to lay the blame with him alone. If our sole criticism of him is that we’re too immature a society to even hear his ideas without suffering from some sort of collective apoplexy, then he’s not doing too badly in my view.
Perhaps you’d rather take LonesomePolecat’s word for it?
What makes you think he’s talking about religious laws only? Read the title to his speech.
Yes, all of it and all of them. My post you quote was more a reaction to the post that preceded it than the AB’s speech.
His actual words are very dense and he talks around the issues a great deal. He doesn’t actually come out and advocate any particular position. He certainly discusses legal changes, but does not clearly advocate them. As I said earlier.
Your position vis-a-vis disputes doesn’t now seem to be what is reflected in your quote I was responding to earlier. You suggested that Muslims might want to resolve disputes in their own way, so why not allow that (as if they can’t do that now). Now you’re accepting they could presently do so. If you always knew that, why did you make the comment that I quoted?
The underlying point being, if this is all the AB is advocating, he doesn’t need to be advocating it at all. So the AB’s speech is either pointless, or he’s advocating actual legal change, or he’s just trying to build bridges etc as you suggest which leads me to…
No he’s doing very badly because he is unable to express thoughts simply. I know the subject matter doesn’t help, but the fact is he is not someone who should ever be put in a position where he needs to communicate complex ideas to a mass audience.
Or maybe read the text of his speech, where he talks about the “universal principle of legal right…historically rooted in Christian theology” and in the next sentence evoking Abraham to give a nice warm we’re-all-the-same-really feel. Or his suggestion that only through embracing the religious background to our secular system can we accomodate other beliefs. My interpretation is that he doesn’t like and doesn’t accept just how separated the current legal system is from his religion.
I don’t think the oblique comment you quote negatives the fact that the speech as a whole is not merely discussing religious law. I agree wholeheartedly with your final sentence.
You’re right on that count. The piece is positively sophomoric. The fact that he’s saying hardly anything of substance is partially disguised by his bloviatory sesquipedalism and tortured prose. The whole essay could have fitted on a single piece of A4, carefully written.
Orwell’s spinning in his grave.
I wonder if he’s taking is cue from Prince Charles, who wants to be Defender of All the Faiths?
It’s good thing Brenda shows no signs of slowing down - both her mother and aunt lived to be over 100.
I’d also like to see marriage removed from the area of things the state has anythign to do with. Then apply whatever rules you want to your private arrangement, assuming they fit within the general framework, of course.
As someone who’s from India, I have to say this is a somewhat rosy picture. It’s true that there’s a different set of laws regarding marriage, inheritance and the like for Muslims (and Christians, incidentally) but it’s far from an easy position. There’s a great deal of clamouring for what’s called the Uniform Civil Code (one set of laws), specially from the right-wing Hindu nationalist parties.
Personally, I’m in favour of a single set of uniform secular laws, but that’s not going to happen in India in my lifetime. The reason I’m not aligned behind the current push for the UCC is that it’s become a religious issue, particularly among Hindus, and I don’t think this should devolve into that. It’s something that has caused riots, and will continue to be explosive for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure what the solution is, frankly, because there are so many forces involved in the situation, most of them politically motivated.
He hardly knows what he’s advocating. He points out that Sharia comes in many flavors, some of them very oppressive indeed. But having correctly noted the many versions, he has precisely diddly-squat to say on how a pluralized society might invite Sharia in and yet make sure it was confining itself to the kinder, gentler version – you know, the version which (as he also points out) still prescribes bilking a widow out of a fair inheritance share, and death to apostates. How to deal with that? Well, we just won’t let those nasty parts in, because they conflict with the rights of the citizens. So a Sharia court would do . . . what exactly?
He does not want citizens to have to choose between state loyalty – meaning, the Enlightenment based common-law legal tradition – and cultural loyalty. Make absolutely no mistake: I do. That is precisely the choice I want people to make. Britian, like the U.S., functions under a fundamentally secular system of justice that acknowledges and protects the rights of individuals not because of their cultural background or their religious beliefs but because of rights granted to them – to all of them – through a rationalist process. He questions the validity and value of expecting people to stand before a tribunal stripped of their cultural or religious motivations and thought processes; far from considering that a weakness of the justice system, I consider it one of its signal strengths: EVERYONE is equal and held to the same standards under the law. What is allowed and what is not allowed is set forth by law, and if you break the law, your motivations may be a mitigating factor regarding your punishment, but they will not change the analysis of your guilt.
It is very difficult to distinguish the bad from the good because the bad so very obviously and heavily outweighs the good where Sharia is concerned, especially in its more draconian forms. He dismisses those forms as practiced by “Islamic primitivists,” disregarding the very real influence and power such “primitivists” wield. (Why the fuck people think I post without reading things is beyond me, BTW.) From the perspective of anyone interested in women’s rights, Sharia law is bad law. It is especially bad law as practiced in its strictest forms (Wahhibism) but it is bad for women even in its most “liberalized” version. And it is IMO disingenuous to rely so heavily on the “volitional” nature of such courts when they are built on a cultural and religious system that does not recognize the equal status of women under the law. A woman who does not know her rights can hardly be said to be acting “volitionally” when she fails to exercise them – especially when her acceptance of her second-class status is inculcated in her as a religious and cultural fundamental. IOW, a widowed Muslim woman might not believe she is entitled to anything other than a reduced portion, precisely because that’s what Sharia says she’s entitled to. Even if she believed she possessed the right to more, she might not risk the cultural disfavor to defy Sharia and make that demand. Williams would apparently gut this inequality from Sharia before allowing formalized Sharia courts, but it is unclear what he’s actually talking about, because a Sharia liberalized to that degree is arguably not Sharia at all.
The fuck it did, unless you think divorce and infidelity are not issues of marital law. Just because YOU don’t know the difference, or the extent to which they may overlap, doesn’t mean I don’t. So you can take your accusations of Islamophobia and stick them straight up your ass.
The bottom line for me is this:
(A) I fucking hate Sharia as a legal system and I make no bones about it. It is a tool of oppression as practiced in most societies exercising it and even it’s best version is based on fundamental gender inequalities that cannot be disregarded.
(B) Sharia also conflates the rule of law with religion, which I think makes for bad law, bad policy, and bad religion. Williams joins in this conflation by suggesting we somehow import Sharia into British jurisprudence but failing to explicate how that could possibly be done. I am not in favor of co-mingling law and religion, period, but I would also argue that anyone suggesting it might be a good idea has an obligation to let us know just how the fuck it could possibly be accomplished.
(C) I stand for the Rule of Law in its universalist, rationalist, and secularist iteration, including the fundamental equality of all petitioners, who can neither avoid their just punishment nor waive the right to claim their just due. I will zealously defend it, even against woolly headed academicians whose attacks may be as good-hearted as they are deeply wrong-headed.
Williams argues that such legal universalism is positivist – as it is, and IMO should be – and therefore arguably sterile (in that it does not acknowledge cultural or religious differences). Far from considering legal universalism, sterile or not, a negative, I consider it the bedrock upon which the Western justice system is rightly built, and I disagree VOCIFEROUSLY with anyone theorizing that such blind universalism is a bad idea. It should be universalist; it should be postivist; it should be blind.
I don’t care if you want to have family courts, misdemeanor courts, admiralty courts, water courts. But ONE LAW for EVERYONE, without regard to religion or culture. If people want to function under some other system, they may, as Princester says, informally make whatever arrangements they might choose – as indeed many people already do through arbitration and negotiation. But for Law, capital-L, enshired as such, ONE LAW for EVERYONE.
I gotta agree with **Jodi ** on this one.[sup]1[/sup] Not on all the theoretical particulars necessarily, but broadly on the principle that a good law is one that protects every citizen equally.
[sup]1[/sup]Yeah, I know. Don’t faint.
See, now, Jodi - that was a much better post than your first one :).
This man may be well meaning, an intellectual even, but he is also a dickhead.
We have had over a thousand years of his sort making laws, influencing the ruling classes, demanding taxation in the form of tithes, operating their courts based on some crazy story about a mythical being.
…and now he suggest that somehow its inevitable that some other bunch of crackpots spouting their own crazy myths about the world and the universe should come in and also have a direct and unelected say in our judicial system.
We really need to get those idiot bishops out of our uper house legislature.
We should not have any direct input into our judicial system, wehter its civil or criminal law, none whatsoever.
We have a prefectly good democracy, we are quite capable of using representation through election to decide how we run our law.
Its ot about how reasonable Sharia might be, its how unreasonable that this idiot should have enough credibility to get noticed so seriously in the media.
Lovely piece of understatement from the Beeb :
I’ll try that again, having missed the edit window.
This man may be well meaning, an intellectual even, but he is also a dickhead.
We have had over a thousand years of his sort making laws, influencing the ruling classes, demanding taxation in the form of tithes, operating their courts based on some crazy story about a mythical being.
…and now he suggest that somehow its inevitable that some other bunch of crackpots spouting their own crazy myths about the world and the universe should come in and also have a direct and unelected say in our judicial system.
We really need to get those idiot bishops out of our uper house legislature.
**They ** should not have any direct input into our judicial system, wetter its civil or criminal law, none whatsoever.
We have a prefectly good democracy, we are quite capable of using representation through election to decide how we run our law.
Its not about how reasonable Sharia might be(though I cannot imagine how it ever could be such), its how unreasonable it is that this idiot should have enough credibility to get noticed so seriously in the media.