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Please address what Dr Williams really said
From the Revd Jane Maycock Sir, — While the Revd Jean Mayland (Letters, 22 February) raises very real concerns about the implications of sharia law, she cannot have taken the trouble to find out what Archbishop Williams actually said in his Temple lecture. Had she done so, she would not have been able to agree with the comment she quotes from the President of the Secular Society, which accuses the Archbishop of seeming “insensitive to where religious conscience ends and unfair discrimination begins”. This is precisely one of the three difficulties that he does identify and addresses in raising the question of the appropriateness of delegating certain legal functions to a supplementary jurisdiction such as sharia. He speaks of the need for a means of deciding the seriousness of matters of religious conscience: “a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription”. The second difficulty addresses Mrs Mayland’s concerns about women in burkhas as opposed to “westernised Muslim women lawyers in trouser suits”. The Archbishop points out that any supplementary jurisdiction could not be allowed “the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights”. For the sake of completeness, the third difficulty he identifies is the need for us to think deeply about the nature of law, citizenship, and social identity. I am very grateful that we have an Archbishop who is unafraid to address such challenging issues, and who does so in such a thoughtful and intelligent manner. JANE MAYCOCKThe Rectory Longlands Road Bowness-on-Windermere LA23 3AS |
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