The Archbishop of Cant

The Prelate of the Church of England has stirred just indignation over and right criticism of his suggestion that the United Kingdom ought to allow her people to choose whether to live under English common law or sharia law. "Treason." "Dangerous." "[F]olking nuts." The descriptions are apt.

I am thus surprised and disappointed to stumble upon Eugene Volokh's defense of the Archibishop's proposal. (He supplements his defense here.) Volokh's argument can briefly be summarized. He analogizes choice of sharia law to a choice of the law of a foreign jurisdiction in an arbitration contract, prenuptial, or other antecedent agreement. These agreements, and the choices of law they contain, are generally enforceable in the United States. Volokh then supposes that choice of sharia law in the UK would be constrained by certain unidentified exceptions. He asserts, "No-one is talking about executing apostates, only about providing for an alternate way to resolve normal civil disputes related to financial transactions, divorce, and the like."

Au contraire. In the real world, where events that shatter liberal illusions go unreported by the liberal media, many Muslims are talking about executing apostates. And executing their daughters. And executing homosexuals, and Christians, and Budweiser salesmen...

Professor Volokh isn't liberal (I would not slander him so) and he generally has good sense. Perhaps he meant to write that the Archbishop of Canterbury isn't talking about executing apostates. That is true. But the Prelate's silence on this matter is at least equally as troubling as the certitude of so many Islamic fascists. That Professor Volokh and the Archbishop perceive no fundamental difference between the choice of sharia law and the choice of Texas law betrays a surfeit of understanding. Indeed, the Archbishop declaimed that "a detailed discussion of the nature of sharia" is "far beyond my competence."

No doubt it is beyond my competence as well. But to pretend that those provisions of sharia that endorse honor killings, forced marriages, spousal abuse, and those which prohibit the education of women and freedom of speech, are somehow ancillary to or severable from more universally-accepted tenets is to misstate the situation. Do those Muslims who clamber to live under sharia ask merely for enforcement of those parts of shari'a that are acceptable to their non-Muslim countrymen? Of course not. If they sought only enforcement of those provisions that are consistent with English common law then what would be the point in demanding a separate body of law at all?

Muslims are not relativists. Perhaps this is a case of the lesser failing to comprehend the greater. The Archbishop fails to comprehend the truth claims of sharia because, having submerged himself in multicultural relativism, he has lost the ability to reason. The truth claims of Islamic fascists are troubling, but they are at least robust and clear. Contrast the clarity of sharia with the following tripe from the Archbishop's speech.

There is a position – not at all unfamiliar in contemporary discussion – which says that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state, in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice. As I have maintained in several other contexts, this is a very unsatisfactory account of political reality in modern societies; but it is also a problematic basis for thinking of the legal category of citizenship and the nature of human interdependence.

What is the Prelate saying here? Who can interpret such mush? To the extent that he is saying anything at all, he appears to be disparaging the rule of common law. Is it any wonder that the Islamic fascists consider Western civilization easy prey?