Sharia and the bishop

Sorry this one's a few days late. I've had a busy week, plus I wanted to give the whole thing a chance to die down before stirring it all up again.

I'm talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury's speech on Sharia law, obviously. Sardar has his say here.

It's alright, I'm not so deluded as to imagine that anything I have to say will have any significant impact on the wider world. Also, I'm actually not planning to write anything too inflamatory.

For what Rowan Williams said bears little resemblance to anything you may have heard about. Far from claiming any kind of religious immunity for criminal acts, his speech focuses mainly on family and in one case employment law. Also, he says that no religious law should be allowed to infringe on liberties guaranteed by British law, and specifically cites the rights of women as an example of this.

And when I think of the life I've led, I'm hardly in a position to accuse anyone else of undermining the nation's respect for the law. I've done plenty of illegal things. I've also done plenty of things I'm ashamed of, although strangely I've never done anything illegal I was ashamed of.

Having said that, Williams does say one absolutely indefensible thing. He's talking about possible grounds for protecting individuals from having to act against their consciences, and he says this.

... any recognition of the need for such sensitivity must also have a recognised means of deciding the relative seriousness of conscience-related claims, a way of distinguishing purely cultural habits from seriously-rooted matters of faith and discipline, and distinguishing uninformed prejudice from religious prescription.

In other words, conscience only counts if it's religious. According to his vision, if I work in a newsagents, and I refuse to sell a copy of the Sun because the pictures in the Sun offend my religious beliefs, then I should be protected against disciplinary action. If I refuse to sell a copy of the Sun because I think it degrades women, I would receive no such protection.

Williams thinks he still lives in a theocracy, and that's because he does. This speech is about his desire to carry on doing so. Dismayed by the threat to the privileged status the Church of England still occupies in our political system, despite the increasingly secular views of the British people, he is seeking to protect it by inviting other religious groups to join him under the legal umbrella. Meanwhile the two thirds of the nation with no religious affiliation at all are left out in the rain.

I have an alternative suggestion for the legal status of religion. I think religions should be treated like any other pressure group. Like Greenpeace, or the National Viewers and Listeners Association. Or like any social or hobbyist group. The State should have no power to prevent Christians, communists or stamp collectors from self-organising, promoting their views and interests and so on, but should offer them no special protection either.

There should be no question of handing state schools over to the communist faith. Derogatory images of penny blacks should be allowed, however offended philatelists may be. David Bellamy should not automatically get seats in an unelected second assembly. And religions should fade into the realm of the private, where they belong.

Sardar talks about uninformed criticism of sharia in the British press, for all the world as if no informed criticism had been offered. He also says that Wiliams was using the subject as a screen for his own concerns, marking a rare moment of harmony between us.

Finally, he unveils his latest borrowing from the world of academe. After mangling chaos theory and quantum physics, he jumps disciplines and borrows from the murky world of post-structuralism. Yes, it's intertextuality. I'm not an expert on semiotics, but as far as I can tell from the discussion and the handy link Sardar provides this just means interpreting a text in relation to another text, which is what I'd always thought it meant from a cursory consideration of the word itself.

Richard Kimber introduced the term, in his analysis of verses 2:21-29, in which he says the author was trying to distance himself from the Jewish creation myth and establish a distinctive Islamic one. Sardar says he likes the idea of using intertextual techniques, but tries to fend off the problematic implication by waving Derrida at it, rather than meeting it head on.

The problematic implication is this. The whole point of comparative analysis is to compare imperfect, human texts. When Kimber says the author is trying to separate himself from Jewish texts, he's talking about Mohammed.

But the Qur'an is supposed to be the word of God. Why would a section of a book written by God have such a human motivation? If God also gave the word to the Jewish people, why would he need to distance himself from his own words? The very idea of analysing the Qur'an in that way places it on the same level as other, mortal books.

It's also supposed to have existed before the universe began, existing separately with God. Why would it have a section about the theological squabbles on one corner of a small planet orbiting a star stuck on the far end of a spiral arm of an entirely unremarkable galaxy?

And come to that, why would the Creator of the universe be so preoccupied with virgins and lewd women? Is there another Qur'an for the gazumsplats of the planet Splarg, full of advice about exactly where they can put their tentacles, and which days of the year they have to keep them to themselves?

Or, does intertextuality make Sardar nervous because the very specificity of the text is the first thing you notice about it? Does it make him nervous because to the modern mind its concerns are a little parochial?