I saw a story last week about the Archbishop of Canterbury, head honcho of the Anglican Church, making some scary comments regarding Islamic sharia law. Then I saw the guy’s picture:

Rowan Williams, © Agence France Press. Yikes.

What do you know, he looks like a raving lunatic. But what did he actually say? For one thing:

There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group: there is already, of course, an Islamic Shari’a Council, much in demand for rulings on marital questions in the UK; and if we were to see more latitude given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identity, we should need a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resource and a high degree of community recognition, so that ‘vexatious’ claims could be summarily dealt with.

Church, meet State.

[...] where the dominant legal culture is non-Islamic, but there is a level of serious recognition of the corporate reality and rights of the umma, there can be no assumption that outside the umma the goal of any other jurisdiction is its destruction. Once again, there has to be a recognition that difference of conviction is not automatically a lethal threat.

Difference of conviction isn’t a lethal threat? We’ll see what it’s done to British culture another twenty or thirty years hence. Rowan Williams is not blindly advocating creation of a parallel court system for Muslim citizens, but he’s certainly not singing the praises of English heritage, either. It’s kind of amazing that a leader of the nation’s Church finds it necessary to carry water for a rapidly growing immigrant group that, rather than make any effort to assimilate to the traditions of their country of choice, lobbies for ever increasing concessions.