The spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown rejected the notion, saying, "British laws should be based on British values." The opposition Conservative Party said it was unacceptable. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal-Democrat Party, said, "We cannot have a situation where there is one law for one person and different laws for another." Trevor Phillips, who chairs the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said the "implication that British courts should treat people differently based on their faith is divisive and dangerous. It risks removing the protection afforded by law, for example, to children in custody cases or women in divorce proceedings."
The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that Sharia is incompatible with democracy, because of its treatment of women, its code of punishment and its denial of religious freedom. (If a Christian missionary succeeds in converting a Muslim, they both face the death penalty under strict Sharia law.) Indeed, the Archbishop acknowledges the difficulties with Sharia. He has said, "nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that's sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well."
And yet he has three strong points to make in support of his controversial view. The first is that British law has traditionally been rather relaxed about accommodating other faiths. Catholic doctors in the National Health Service are not required to perform abortions. Jewish religious courts have long flourished in Britain to settle issues of divorce, commercial contracts and tenancy. Moreover, the British government is already planning to issue Treasury bonds that conform to Sharia financial law against usury.
The Archbishop's second point is that since there are close to 2 million Muslims in Britain, most of them citizens, it is unwise to present them with a stark choice between obeying the state law or their religion in a way that could alienate them from British law.
"There's a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law," he notes.
His third point is that Sharia law and Islamic traditions need to be better understood and not left to "sensational reporting and opinion polls," which produce anxieties among both Muslims and Christians which bedevil reasonable discussion.
He cites the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, who has written that "many Muslim intellectuals do not even dare to refer to the concept [of Sharia] for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work."
The difficulty will be in drawing the line and defining where Sharia stops and where British law prevails.