Legal Commentary

In a recent interview, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, explained his view that, in the interest of "social cohesion", certain aspects of Shari'a, or Islamic law, should be incorporated into British law.  (The suggestion prompted Ruth Gledhill, in The Times, to ask, "Has the Archbishop Gone Bonkers?").  Well, has he?  Or, are his remarks better understood as a cautious and thoughtful reminder about the importance of legal pluralism?  Or, as something else?  What do people think?

In his interview, he elaborated:

It seem unavoidable and indeed as a matter of fact certain provision of Sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law; so it's not as if we're bringing in an alien and rival system; we already have in this country a number of situations in which the law the internal law of religious communities is recognised by the law of the land as justified conscientious objections in certain circumstances in providing certain kinds of social relations, so I think we need to look at this with a clearer eye and not imagine either we know exactly what we mean by Sharia and not just associate it with what we read about Saudi Arabia or wherever. . . .

Commenting on the reaction that such an incorporation is inconsistent with liberalism, he said:

[A] lot of what's written suggests that the ideal situation is one in which there is one law and only one law for everybody; now that principle that there's one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it's a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don't have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and the law needs to take some account of that, so an approach to law which simply said, 'There is one law for everybody and that is all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or your allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts'. I think that's a bit of a danger.

I tend to be sympathetic to the claim that, generally speaking, genuine "social cohesion" is better achieved through pluralism than through an insistence that all sectors of society honor and enforce the (usually liberal) rules that we impose on state action.  Is this all that the Archbishop is saying?  Or, do his remarks suggest a capitulation that goes beyond pluralism?