Get Rowan

February 8th, 2008

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I’m currently reading Tony Benn’s diaries from 1980-1990, and whilst going over the sections dealing with the Falklands War I caught myself wondering for a moment whether the egregious examples back then of how the positions of prominent public figures were misrepresented by the media were worse than our contemporary ones.

Well, that question’s been answered for me.

Leaders of all the main political parties made clear that they did not accept Dr Rowan Williams’s assertion that the incorporation of some aspects of Sharia was “unavoidable”.

The extravagant absurdity and general acting-out that has followed Williams’ subtleties shows itself thick with almost wilful stupidity, buttressed by the usual complaints that it’s quite hard to understand what Williams is saying sometimes.

[Williams] has just told the BBC that the adoption of certain parts of Sharia law is “unavoidable”. He believes that if we do not adopt it, there will be a tension between the cultural customs of parts of the community and the requirements of the state.

There is already a tension; there always will be a tension. Given the existence of a minority that demands some degree of legal recognition for its social practices, against the tide as it were, such tensions will exist. The ongoing struggle for gay rights is an obvious example, whose history shows how what actually happens to attempts to articulate demands for legal recognition influence the perceptions of gay people themselves as to who they are (the progression from Wolfenden to civil partnerships is not just a list of changing demands - it is arguably the history of a changing social identity, of what it means to be gay). As with the French Revolution, it’s too early to say how this is going to turn out: certain sexual practices among gay men continue to draw attention to the tensions that still exist between gay identities and the law, particularly on the issue of mutual consent to physical harm. What becomes of such tensions is an open question. They will not, however, simply be resolved and disappear once and for all.

Mutual accommodation of this kind is a process that is ineluctably a feature of public life, of politics in general. As Williams says, its irresolvable tensions are present wherever competing demands of loyalty and commitment are generated, which includes countries such as Jinnah’s Pakistan, Morocco and Jordan, where the tension between the civil and criminal law and Sharia is also present. From the religious perspective in such situations, mutual accommodation means that

There has therefore to be some concept of common good that is not prescribed solely in terms of revealed Law, however provisional or imperfect such a situation is thought to be.

Williams’ thinking at least shows (whatever you think of his tendency to go for both-and over either-or) that he understands that the relation between the universal (law) and particular (individual or group identity, however constituted) is always one which contains conflict, whereas those of his critics that simply appeal to the supremacy of ‘the law’ seem wedded to the assumption that this relation is one in which the particular should simply be subsumed under the universal, taken up into it and therefore cleansed of its particularity. In other words, the argument of these critics amounts to an authoritarian call for a confession of allegiance.

One of the problems with this argument however, is that the appeal to unity actually serves as a mask for other forms of conflict, kinds which are naturally resistant to remedies that can be pursued in the public arena. I have in mind of course those who see the Sharia law issue as another cover for the great Muzzie Zerg Rush, due as always to arrive at any moment.