The Archbishop of Cantebury...

TheBrick(Tommy) The entire speech if you want to read it (I have not) rather than sensationalists sound bites. Better to judge something in it's entirety rather than take it out of context.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/07_02_08_islam.pdf

I have just had a quick read through the entire speech. It is quite heavy going and really requires several reads to full grasp. However it does raise many interesting facts. Two odd ones I have pulled out and quoted below. The points of which he is suggesting the idea of sharia law and the way in which he suggests an poly-legal system are not unreasonable nor are they simple.

Theology and theoretical politics is not an area in which I am well versed but many of the ideas and areas to which they would be applied seem reasonable. Due to my lack of knowledge of this area however I would like to here similarly well structured and referenced arguments to the contrary.

The Archbishop of Cantebury
sharia designates primarily – to quote Ramadan again – ‘the expression of the universal principles of Islam [and] the framework and the thinking that makes for their actualization in human history’ (32). Universal principles: as any Muslim commentator will insist, what is in view is the eternal and absolute will of God for the universe and for its human inhabitants in particular; but also something that has to be ‘actualized’, not a ready-made system. If shar’ designates the essence of the revealed Law, sharia is the practice of actualizing and applying it; while certain elements of the sharia are specified fairly exactly in the Qur’an and Sunna and in the hadith recognised as authoritative in this respect, there is no single code that can be identified as ‘the’ sharia. And when certain states
impose what they refer to as sharia or when certain Muslim activists demand its recognition alongside secular jurisdictions, they are usually referring not to a universal and fixed code established once for all but to some particular concretisation of it at the hands of a tradition of jurists.

The Archbishop of Cantebury
clearly the refusal of a religious believer to act upon the legal recognition of a right is not, given the plural character of society, a denial to anyone inside or outside the community of access to that right.