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Islam in the UK: comments prompted by Dr Williams’s Temple lecture

Sir, — I am the widow of an Anglican canon. Sadly, I am also the grandmother of a Muslim convert. Visiting me recently, he said: “We must all stop voting and so bring an end to democracy. Democracy is genocide, and it must be replaced by God’s law,” i.e. sharia law. New Muslims are coached, I am sure, to call sharia law “God’s law” when dealing with Christians.

That my mother was a suffragette only added to my horror at my grandson’s remarks. It is outrageous that foreign imams come to this country, probably knowing almost nothing of our history and culture, and under the guise of religion, teach our young so disastrously. I was not surprised to hear later that the mosque attended by my grandson was under police surveillance.

My late husband and I have had great admiration for Dr Rowan Williams, but how can he advocate the settling of matrimonial and domestic disputes by sharia courts, given Islam’s inability to accept the equality of the sexes, which is enshrined in our law?

Name & Address Supplied

From Mrs Kathleen Kinder
Sir, — Your leader comment (15 February) states: “The reaction against sharia law is, at root, an anxiety about living alongside people who subscribe to different rules and appeal to a different authority.”

That, I believe, is an understatement. The real fear is that there will be a Muslim takeover of our society in the not-too-distant future, and that our religion, agnosticism or atheism, culture and way of life are becoming increasingly threatened. In the minds of many ordinary non-Muslims, there is a dumb resignation and a growing, silent anger against the fact that these changes seem inevitable.

Deep feelings can be kept under wraps until an event provokes an immoderate response. Protests against the proposed mega-mosque in east London and the muezzin blasting over Oxford have been well publicised. Recently, a Nonconformist chapel becoming a mosque in a small, northern country town prompted the comment: “You would expect this in an urban setting, but not here. Will the ancient parish church be next?”

It will be fashionable to blame such comments on ignorance and rural snobbery, but there is a deep-seated fear giving rise to anger, which has roots in the age-old rivalry between two great world religions whose holy books command the faithful to evangelise the world.

In the epilogue to his book Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the medieval Mediterranean world, Stephen O’Shea compares the religious conflicts that scarred the Mediterranean lands for centuries to the developing situation in Europe. He writes: “Faced with the threatening or the unfamiliar, the children of the Enlightenment may yet come to resemble the creatures of the sea of faith. In the Balkans in recent years, modern nationalism turned even more murderous than usual when admixed with religious resentment.”

For many in our society, the secular law of the land is not only regarded as best for all our peoples: it is seen as a bulwark that can keep in its place Islamic influence. Threaten that legal system, and you reap the whirlwind.

I do not believe that the Church has begun to get to grips with the sheer complexity of the problem. How can you tackle deep-seated anger, when it is politically incorrect even to mention it?
KATHLEEN KINDER
Valley View, Station Road
Giggleswick, Settle
North Yorkshire BD24 0AB

From the Revd Jean Mayland
Sir, — The Revd Richard Morgan and others (Letters, 15 February) call on us to be sensitive to Muslim opinion. He seems blissfully unaware that Muslim women from Baroness Warsi on have roundly condemned the suggestion of the adoption of elements of sharia law in this country.

The Archbishop just does not seem to realise how a lecture in London with westernised Muslim women lawyers in trouser suits would work out for women in burkhas in the back streets of Leeds, Batley, or Bradford.

He has never spoken out on issues of justice, and he has never openly supported women priests or gay people. He has spoken out only about Roman Catholics and their right to oppose gay adoptions, and now for some separate religious laws. The Church of England is as guilty as the rest, and has exemptions from equal-opportunities legislation over the employment of women and gay people.

I tend to agree with the comment by the President of the Secular Society that “there are already unacceptable opt-outs in equality legislation. The Archbishop seems insensitive to where religious conscience ends and unfair discrimination begins.”
JEAN MAYLAND
Minster Cottage
51 Sands Lane, Barmston
East Yorks YO25 8PQ

From Dr Alec Ryrie
Sir, — The fuss about the Archbishop’s remarks on sharia reveals a deeper strategic problem for British Christians.

Our society is increasingly fearful of and hostile towards Islamism (and Islam), but is aware that this seems like rank prejudice and crusader-talk. “Religion” in general is a much more palatable target. So Christians get caught in the crossfire, as the “new atheists” prove their anti-racist credentials on us.

There is no obvious way out. Join in the Islam-bashing, and “Christian” becomes a BNP code-word. Oppose it, and our society concludes that we are Islamism’s useful idiots. The reaction to Dr Williams’s comments shows that many people already think this.

Like the 1930s democracies squeezed between fascism and communism, we face a struggle on two fronts. We need to find a voice simultaneously to criticise both Islamist and secularist fundamentalisms, humanely but directly, to reveal them both for the deadening, threadbare orthodoxies that they are.

It would at least make a change from fighting each other.
ALEC RYRIE
Reader in Church History
Department of Theology and Religion
Durham University, Abbey House
Palace Green, Durham DH1 3RS

From Dr Phillip Rice
Sir, — The law of financial products in the UK may seem a little arcane, but sharia has reached here since 2003. When the Archbishop of Canterbury said that “it seems unavoidable and, indeed, as a matter of fact, certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law,” financial products may not have come to mind. Many of the column-inches in the press have missed this example of “already here”.

Mona Siddiqui (Comment, 15 February) noted briefly the part played by financial packages. This deserves more notice; and the City of London is definitely the place to observe the growth of sharia-compliant financial packages, and the example of the accommodation over the treatment of interest in financial products.

For this, there has been a characteristic British legal fix over mortgage/stamp duty, where the law has been changed to remove the disadvantage of double stamp duty for those unhappy by religious conviction with the payment of interest. Originally, an Islamic bank mortgage avoided the payment of “Western-style interest” by introducing itself as a counter party within the mortgage; but, under the pre-2003 law, this incurred the double charge of stamp duty. The Islamic mortgage structure was protected from April 2003, and the double charge removed.

As a professional economist, I notice accommodation over something as basic as bank interest, itself worthy of an ethical debate. Interestingly, the Authorised Version calls it usury, while the modern translators (Matthew 25, NIV, NRSV) use the more accommodating word “interest” (implying a non-exploitative rate of interest); and sharia wants essentially capital gains in the course of trade, not interest.

Here the Archbishop has managed to recognise and articulate the importance of social cohesion reaching even to financial products within God’s law.
PHILLIP RICE
23 Christchurch Square
London E9 7HU

From the Revd Peter Phillips
Sir, — Andrew Brown (Press, 15 February) coyly omits to mention his own tirade against Archbishop Williams in The Guardian. This surely belonged in the stream of responses that he himself labelled “straightforward abuse”. Readers should be able to count on the reasonable impartiality of your press reviewer. Mr Brown forfeited any claim to impartiality when he began his predictable and sustained sniping at the Archbishop.
PETER PHILLIPS
Wesley College, College Park Drive
Henbury Road, Bristol BS10 7QD

From Canon Dr Rod Garner
Sir, — Instead of the foolish calls for his resignation, we should be thankful for an Archbishop who has reminded us of the Christian duty of hard thought in relation to complex issues. A Church that settles for soundbites and soft answers soon forgets that thinking is a moral activity that can help us to see more clearly.

As for the charge that Dr Williams’s style of communication is difficult and opaque, I am not aware that anyone has ever suggested that the letters of St Paul or the writings of the Fourth Gospel should be excised from the New Testament for the same reasons.
ROD GARNER
Holy Trinity Vicarage
24 Roe Lane, Southport PR9 9DX



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