Religion reporters have been tracking the slow disintegration of the Anglican Communion since 2003 with one word itching away at the tips of their typing fingers — schism. We don’t get to write history with a capital “H” that often and the few times we do can be career high points. So the prospect of covering an event where you can draw parallels to the Great Schism of 1054 (east-west back then, north-south now, etc) is tempting. In the meantime, though, even a hint of a schism is enough to land the term in a story. But it has to have the right packaging — adjectives such as “potential” or “looming” or something else — to indicate the big kaboom has not actually happened (or at least not yet). So we can scratch the itch a bit, but not too much.

Covering the current orthodox Anglican conference GAFCON in Jerusalem, the Daily Telegraph has scratched at that itch really hard with a story headlined “Anglican church schism declared over homosexuality.” It took a 94-page guidebook for “a pilgrimage to a Global Anglican future” as proof that Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinole and his allies have finally cut their ties to the Anglican Communion. “Hardline church leaders have formally declared the end of the worldwide Anglican communion, saying they could no longer be associated with liberals who tolerate homosexual clergy,” it wrote.

Well, up to a point, as our news story reports. The guidebook, entitled “The Way, The Truth and The Life”, goes to the rhetorical brink of schism … and stops. “There is no longer any hope … for a unified Communion,” Akinola writes. “All journeys must end some day.” He gives no road map for the future.

Robert Duncan, the Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh, also edged right up to the brink in a speech to GAFCON: “There remains no way to go forward together.” But no S-word…

Having followed this drama since gay bishop Gene Robinson’s consecration five years ago, I well understand the itch to finally write what seems to be the logical conclusion of this endless muddling through. But maybe a schism is not the conclusion we’ll get. Over at The Lead, Jim Naughton, spokesman for the Episcopal diocese of Washington, D.C., had an interesting take on why this goes on and on:

“Whether there will actually be schism is an open question, but at least one factor mitigates against it: as soon as schism is declared, the media will loose interest in the Anglican Churches of Nigeria and Uganda, and their small, but influential group of followers in the United States. (How much had you read about these Churches before the consecration of Gene Robinson?) At that point, these churches will no longer be useful to the donors who have made GAFCON possible, and the money will be reallocated to other fronts in the culture wars. It is in the interest of Akinola, Orombi, Minns, Sugden, etc. to sustain the Communion in a state of near-schism for as long as possible, and then, at some point, find a way short of schism to declare victory.”

Did you read much about the Anglican Communion before this dispute over Gene Robinson appeared? If not, do you think it will disappear from the news when and if the issue is ever solved?

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran has apparently left diplomacy behind in his past life. The cardinal is now the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, and as such, Pope Benedict’s point man for relations with all non-Christian religions except for Judaism.

From 1975 to 2003, Tauran was often a tight-lipped Vatican diplomat. He did his job so well he ended his previous life as Secretary for Relations with States, effectively the
Vatican’s foreign minister and number three position in the Secretariat of State.

When he left that job, the Frenchman was briefly Archivist of Holy Roman Church and kept a mostly low profile.

But since September of last year, when he was named to a position in the inter-religious dialogue department, he seems to have undergone a metamorphosis. He has been more outspoken. In the initial response to the “Common Word” dialogue appeal from 138 Muslim scholars, he seemed unusually firm but it wasn’t clear that this might be a trend.

Then in March, in a breakfast meeting with journalists, Tauran did not pull his punches when speaking of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. He said Williams had been “mistaken and naive” for suggesting that some aspects of Sharia law in Britain were unavoidable.

Even though he was indirectly speaking of one area of his expertise — Islam — he was in a certain way “invading” another Vatican department’s turf since relations with Anglicans is the domain of the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity — headed by German Cardinal Walter Kasper. In fact, Kasper’s department did not find out that Tauran had criticised Williams until his comments were already in the British media.

“That’s just Tauran being Tauran,” one Vatican official commented.

Tauran did it again this week with a straight-talking interview with terrasanta.net, a website which specialises in Holy Land affairs. He said what many in the Vatican and beyond had felt for a long time — that the world is obsessed with Islam, that such an obsession is holding Christian dialogue “hostage”, and that in the world of religious dialogue, there should not be first-class religions and second-class religions.

With no help from computers, Cardinal Tauran has apparently entered his own form of second life. Vive la difference!

There is speculation in Rome that Pope Benedict might receive about 400,000 (yes, 400,000) Traditional Anglican Communion members into the Roman Catholic Church this summer, after the official Anglican Communion finishes its ten-yearly Lambeth Conference on August 3. Both the Church of England Newspaper in the U.K. and the National Catholic Register in the U.S. have run stories on this. Both sides are subscribers only, so all links here are to reports about them.

According to the Church of England Newspaper, talks between the Vatican and the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) focus on the question of whether a group can enter into full communion with Rome as an independent rite, similar to the Eastern rite churches that keep their own traditions and leadership. That sounds like it means they would want to use the Book of Common Prayer, keep their married clergy and retain some autonomy of member churches.

The newspaper quotes the Episcopal Bishop of Fort Worth, Texas, the Rt Rev Jack Iker — now in Rome on study leave — that “it is thought that the Pope is sympathetic to the dilemma of traditionalists in the Anglican way.”

It noted that “no formal dialogue exists between TAC and the (Council) for Promoting Christian Unity — the Vatican agency tasked with ecumenical relations.” Catholic Online commented:“The TAC may be getting ahead of itself on how quickly such a request will be acted upon.”

This is still speculation and we have no inside track on this. But it should be noted that Benedict has shown a taste for surprising us on such issues. Remember the baptism of the Italian Muslim Magdi Allam at Easter? The Vatican dicastery following Islam reportedly knew nothing about that in advance, even though it caused a flap in Vatican-Muslim relations.

Benedict also kept his cards close to his chest when he wrote the text of the new Latin Good Friday prayer that upset Jews when it came out. Cardinal Walter Kasper, whose Pontifical Council for Christian Unity includes the office for relations with Judaism, was not informed about the exact wording until near its publication, at which point it was also a fait accompli. One would have thought he should have been told, but…

Those weren’t the only rabbits he’s pulled out of a hat. Benedict upset French bishops in 2006 by recognising the Institute of the Good Shepherd, a group of five traditionalist priests in Bordeaux who had fallen out with the schismatic SSPX group and asked to return to Rome. The pope made them answerable to him, not the local archbishop (Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who also happened to be the head of the bishops conference at the time). Benedict let these returning priests use the old Tridentine rite that the French bishops did not want to see restored (and had not yet been boosted by the pope’s motu proprio ). All this was presented to the French bishops as a fait accompli and the official statements they made about it afterwards, when loyalty to the pope meant they had to defend the decision, were noticably lukewarm.

The TAC, which has 14 member churches around the world, has been talking with the Vatican since 1990. It asked for full communion last year. In its letter, it wrote: “We seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See, at once treasuring the full expression of catholic faith and treasuring our tradition within which we have come to this moment.”

If — repeat if — this happens, it would be quite a coup. Although the TAC is not part of the Anglican Communion, it would most probably be seen as another blow for mainstream Anglicanism. Do you think Benedict would do that to Rowan?

The June issue of “Harper’s Magazine” has a provocative essay by Garret Keizer called “Turning Away From Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church.”

The split in the global Anglican Communion over the consecration of the openly gay U.S. Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson and the broader issue of the church’s take on sexual orientation and other social issues in general has been extensively reported on.

These fault lines are partly but far from exclusively geographical, dividing more traditional churches in the developing world — especially Africa — from those in the developed world. It threatens to undermine Anglican provinces like the Episcopal Church in the United States by creating competing authorities within them, one for a more liberal majority and another for a conservative minority.

Dissecting the jargon of the conflict, Keizer sees parallels between the corporate world and the shifting currents of globalization. “What is ‘provincial realignment,’ at bottom, if not the ecclesiastical version of a corporate merger? What is ‘alternative oversight,’ if not church talk for a hostile takeover?,” he writes, seeing these comparisons in the methods rather than the motives of those involved.

He also chimes in on a theme that has been raised in different ways elsewhere by others in dicussions of America’s Religious Right: “How does a Christian population implicated in militarism, usury, sweatshop labor and environmental rape find a way to sleep at night? Apparently, by making a very big deal out of not sleeping with Gene Robinson.”

Keizer is an Episcopalian, former priest and contributing editor to Harper’s.

The Anglican split will be back in the headlines in coming weeks as Gene Robinson marries his partner, conservative Anglicans meet in Amman and Jerusalem and the Anglican Communion — minus some conservatives led by Akinola — convenes for its once-every-ten-years Lambeth Conference. What do you think the Anglican Communion will look like after this rocky patch passes?

It has been spoken of as a setting for schism. But could the Lambeth Conference — the worldwide Anglican Communion’s once-a-decade global meeting beginning July 16 in England — be a bust when it comes to headline-making news?

That’s the way leaders of the U.S. Episcopal Church see it. There will be no grand pronouncements made or resolutions voted on, they say. The traditional Western parliamentary idea that produces winners and losers on debated issues has been scrapped for face-to-face meetings. Some of them have been baptized ”Indaba groups,” which Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has described as a Zulu term denoting “a meeting for purposeful discussion among equals.”

The Rev. Ian Douglas, a professor of World Christianity at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts who helped plan the meeting, recently told reporters at a briefing:

“I appreciate that it’s going to be a hard job for the media because there isn’t a focal point of up-down decison making, and that (much) of what’s really happening … is going to be happening in very small, very close one-on-one relationships and deep conversation.

“I  don’t envy your job. It’s going to be difficult to get ‘the story’ out of Lambeth unless you want to tell the story that as leaders come together to be better equipped in their service to God’s mission in the wider world,  not only is the Anglican Communion strengthened but God’s purposes are better fulfilled in the wider world. It’s a tough story to tell but I think it’s a story.”

The 1998 Lambeth Conference did produce news — a resolution known as Lambeth 1:10 that said homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture. That pronouncement became a major part of the splintering now going on in the worldwide church after the American branch in 2003 installed the first the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of Anglican history — Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Robinson was not invited to this summer’s meeting at Canterbury though he plans a fringe presence — after he weds his long-time partner in June.

The news at Lambeth ‘08 then may be more about who doesn’t come. Already 280 conservative bishops from Africa, Latin America and Asia have said they will attend a break-away summit in Jerusalem in June to “prepare for an Anglican future in which the Gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centered mission a top priority.” They expect about 1,000 conservative Anglican leaders to attend.

Bishops from Uganda, Kenya and Australia have said they plan to boycott Lambeth, to which more than 800 bishops have been invited. Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, a leader among the traditionalists, has said he may also skip Lambeth.

Douglas, in the briefing mentioned earlier, said the hope is that the bishops who attend the meeting in Jerusalem will also go to Lambeth. There is, he said, “no fear or concern” that the Jerusalem summit is an exclusionary Lambeth alternative.

Much of this reflects Anglicanism’s structure where federation trumps hierarchy. The Episcopal News Service noted at one point that there is no complete agreement on when any resolution passed by a Lambeth Conference becomes official church teaching. The Lambeth meetings, which date to the 19th century, do not have specific authority to require compliance with their resolutions, it said.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who joined Douglas at the briefing, also has a long-term view. One of the first Lambeth Conferences well over a century ago, she said, was called “to deal with issues like bishops teaching things that other bishops found uncomfortable, and bishops wandering into other bishops’ territories and how do to we transfer clergy from one part of the communion to another.

“And we still haven’t sorted that out. The gathering will continue to wrestle with some of the challenges of living together in a compex, diverse and sometimes challenging family. That is God’s gift to use and we celebrate it,” she said at the briefing (view webcast here).

It also reflects Anglicanism’s diversity, with half of its 77 million members now in Africa, Asia and Latin America, many with conservative views on issues that go deeper than just those involving gays. In terms of numbers, the bishops organizing the Jerusalem meeting claim to represent 17 countries and 35 million followers.

The road from Jerusalem to Canterbury will be closely watched.

U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair often saw eye to eye politically. Are they about to see eye to eye religiously?

Blair, a life-long Anglican, converted to Catholicism in December after he left office in June. The Italian weekly magazine Panorama is reporting in its latest edition that Bush, a Methodist, may follow his political soul-mate and also convert to Catholicism after he leaves office next year.

To be honest, the odds of this happening appear as good as those of the proverbial snowball in hell. In fact, the Panorama article starts with two sentences saying this “might” happen and the rest of the article is background.

Panorama tries to build up its case by reminding the reader that Bush prayed together with Pope Benedict when the pontiff visited the White House on April 16, that Bush’s brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida, converted to Catholicism, the religion of his wife, and that a number of Bush’s advisers are Catholic.

The only other Italian publication playing with this idea was Corriere della Sera, which ran a story on April 17 entitled “Bush, a crypto-Catholic president.” Its correspondent Massimo Gaggi pins his speculation on the Washington Post, which ran a story on April 13 by Daniel Burke of Religion News Service. Citing the high number of Catholics in his administration, Burke wrote that “George W. Bush could well be the nation’s first Catholic president.” At the very end of his piece, he has two quotes to the effect that Bush is a “closet Catholic” and the parallel to Blair, but no outright speculation about conversion. Maybe that’s how all this started and found its way into Panorama.

What I find most interesting is the attention that the Panorama story is getting on some religious blogs. Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (left) ran his own translation of it on his blog What Does the Prayer Really Say? Father Z, as he is known, says the article is “a strange item” and is “typical of much of the Italian press”. He concludes his entry by saying “A lot of this article is pure fantasy.”

While Father Z and I have had our differences in the past, I tend to agree with him on this one. What is fascinating is the number of comments and the level of passion Father Z’s posting has attracted on his blog, with some readers dismissing the conversion possibility outright but others convinced that Bush will eventually convert because he was “blinded on the road to Washington” (as in the headline on the Panorama article pictured at right) .

The Episcopal Church has been riven by the issue of ordaining gay clergy and the broader issue of gay rights. Now Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has taken a stand on an issue which is probably not as divisive, at least in Episcopal and Anglican circles: climate change.

In a letter to the U.S. Senate on Monday, Schori urged the body to “take up climate change legislation at the earliest possible moment.”

“Climate change is a threat not only to God’s creation but to all of humanity,” Schori said, noting that her concerns were formed by both her faith and her training as a scientist. She has a background in oceanography, making her perhaps better qualified than most spiritual leaders to comment on the issue.

Schori said that climate change caused by carbon fuel emissions exacerbated poverty, creating a vicious cycle as poverty itself contributed to global warming as the poor felled forests and sought other sources of energy.

U.S. evangelicals have made similar points when calling for action on the issue. While America’s roughly 75 million evangelicals far outnumber the 2.4 million member Episcopal Church, the former are deeply divided on the issue.

The evangelical left and center have embraced it under the banner of “creation care” while the evangelical right remains suspicious of calls to reduce U.S. carbon emissions, partly because of their close ties to the business wing of the Republican Party, partly because some see humanity having “dominion” over nature.

But even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, said recently that it had neglected the issue in the past but would take stronger though unspecified stances in the future.

The mainline Episcopal Church may not have such a sharp divide on the issue, which will be a welcome relief to many in its fragmenting fold.

Comments on Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s speech about sharia are starting to explore some of the ideas in more detail. Opinions are still mostly against the idea, but there are some defenders and there are more balanced arguments than the first wave of reactions. Here are some of the latest items we found interesting:

First of all, documentation — Ruth Gledhill came up with Williams’s Q&A after the speech, including the full text and the video. Note he insists he is talking about “supplementary jurisdiction” and not “parallel systems.”

muslimmatters.org argues in Shariah ‘Courts’ and Freedom of Contract that the issue is simply one of arbitration, something already allowed under the law: “The fact that the parties are choosing to settle their commercial or social disagreements by reference to the Qu’ran is therefore of no more consequence to society than if they decided to settle the same dispute by tossing a coin, asking a neighbour to decide, or any of the other myriad of ways in which human beings settle disagreements peacefully.”

altmuslim.com on One man’s sharia: “Now that the debate has become public, all concerned parties need to seek some clarity. What can be done through the courts that cannot today be done simply by mutual agreement? Proponents of sharia arbitration have not been detailed enough in their proposals to provide a suitable answer to this. If two parties want to agree to an Islamic solution that does not conflict with state law, then that is already happening in the form of arbitration. If the issue is enforcement, however, then by definition it is not mutually agreeable and the issue is about imposing a sharia interpretation that at least one party does not accept. It is this point that scares many non-Muslims and Muslims alike.”

UPDATE: Ekklesia has an interesting item called Muslims puzzled over Sharia row, but Evangelicals and inter-faith group urge debate which says: “Muslim lawyers say they are puzzled that Archbishop Rowan Williams raised the Sharia issue before they have had a chance to tackle some key concerns.” On the other hand, evangelicals are keen to start talking because they see this as a way to bring up their own concerns about secular laws. “We want to use this as a spring-board to find a way forward for those in our, and other, faith communities who feel disenfranchised on matters of conscience by the changing meaning of what it is to be British,” said the Rev Joel Edwards, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance.

The Washington Post’s On Faith blog has an interesting series of American reactions to Williams’s proposal, most of them not enthusiastic.

TotallyJewish.com reports on how Muslims are seeking advice from Orthodox Jews on how their Beth Din courts operate.

Mona Eltahawy slams what she calls Delusions in Canterbury and says the archbishop’s tolerance towards sharia “is a tolerance that condones only the most conservative options for Muslims. It is at best a form of the racism of lower expectations - the cheapest bargaining chip of liberal guilt… As a Muslim woman - born in Egypt, raised in Saudi Arabia - I can only laugh at the archbishop’s naïveté. In Egypt, as in many Muslim countries, the legal system has been completely modernized, with the exception of one area that remains caught in the web of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago — family law. Shariah is used only to govern the lives of women and children.”

Ali Eteraz continues to examine the implications of using sharia law in a Western context. Two latest posts are When US Courts Apply Islamic Law and Concurrent jurisdiction would be used to coerce average believers.

The London Catholic weekly the Tablet has a nice cover showing Williams among the lions in the Colosseum in ancient Rome. It also has two interesting articles:

Theo Hobson says in Quiet Voice of modernity’s enemy that “...liberal Protestantism is basic to our national identity, although people don’t tend to think of it as ‘liberal Protestantism’ but as ‘our Christian heritage’ and ‘our liberal tradition’. This is what Williams seems not to grasp, or chooses not to.”

The editorial Crisis of Identity makes the point that “… the process of secularisation is eating away at society. Too often, people of faith feel they no longer fit.”

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has set off a storm in Britain by saying that some aspects of sharia Islamic law would have to be integrated into the legal system there. There has been almost unanimous criticism of his proposals, including from some Muslim politicians. I’ve read through both his BBC interview and Temple Festival speech to see if there is another message that is being drowned out by the headlines and hullabaloo. There are signs of one, but there are so many questionable assumptions and assertions about Islam and sharia in there that these issues naturally dominate.

The archbishop’s statement about some aspects of sharia being”unavoidable” is so clear that it is hard to argue in his defence that it was taken out of context or hardened up by headline-hungry hacks. This is not like Pope Benedict’s ill-fated Regensburg speech in 2006, where the pontiff quoted a Byzantine emperor slamming Islam and later said he didn’t mean to say he agreed with it. Williams talked about accommodating some aspects of sharia law and spoke in detail about this.

His main complaint seems to be summed up in this passage late in the speech: “One of the most frequently noted problems in the law in this area is the reluctance of a dominant rights-based philosophy to acknowledge the liberty of conscientious opting-out from collaboration in procedures or practices that are in tension with the demands of particular religious groups.” His example for this is the case of Catholic adoption agencies in Britain that have been told they must stop refusing to provide children to gay couples or risk being shut down. The law should allow opt-outs for cases of conscience, he argues, something that is already allowed for doctors who refuse to perform abortions. He also notes that Orthodox Jews have their own courts for some religious issues. So his argument seems to be that opt-outs are needed and Muslims need to have theirs.

Simon Barrow, director of the religion think tank Ekklesia, told me he thought “there may be a more reasonable case here than what’s come over.” But the former theology professor tripped up by trying to discuss the issues in public as if he were back in academe. The BBC interview only compounded this by adding the word “unavoidable.”

Williams made several assumptions and assertions about sharia law that cried out for explanation. If he held a news conference to explain his thinking, here are a few that I would expect to be challenged.

Some points by Williams (”ABC“) in the BBC interview:

ABC – “Sharia is a method rather than a code of law … there’s a lot of internal debate within the Islamic community generally about the nature of Sharia and its extent.” — Q. If sharia is so unclear, how can it be accomodated into something as exacting as a Western legal code?

ABC — “The principle, the vision, that animates the Islamic legal provision (on women’s rights) needs broadening.” — Q. Who will decide how to reform women’s rights in Islam and ensure that all sharia courts in Britain apply it? Who will suspend the traditional sharia rule that a woman is worth half a man when it comes to issues like inheritance or testimony in court?

ABC — “It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever licence so to speak a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal.” — Q. What is the purpose of allowing religious courts if defendants can turn around and appeal to civil courts to overturn decisions against them?

ABC — “That principle that there’s one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society.” — Q. Should Britain undermine such a fundamental legal principle to accomodate a minority (and probably a minority within that minority)? Is this the only way to do it? Would decisions by a sharia court, such as a divorce, have to be confirmed by a civil court?

Some points from the Temple Festival speech:

ABC — “There are a good many voices arguing for an extension of the liberty of ijtihad – basically reasoning from first principles rather than simply the collation of traditional judgments.” Q. — Aren’t most of those Muslims stressing ijtihad the kind of liberal Muslims whose views are rejected by the more traditional scholars who would man a sharia court bench?

ABC — “This account would be hotly contested by some committed Islamic primitivists, by followers of Sayyid Qutb and similar polemicists; but it is fair to say that the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recognise this degree of political plurality as consistent with Muslim integrity. ” Q. — Who defines who the ‘primitivists’ are and whether their views get a hearing?

ABC –”There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group … 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.” Q. – There is no single religious authority in Islam and Muslims themselves often disagree on certain issues. How can Britain succeed in creating something Muslims themselves have not produced?

Andrew Brown put it well in The Guardian Comment is Free blog: “Dr Williams, characteristically, is interested in the arguments over what sharia law actually says. The rest of the country is more interested in whether and how it might be enforced. Only if Islamic law can be reduced to a game played between consenting adults can it be acceptably enforced in this country; and that’s not, I think, how it is understood by its practitioners. Let’s hope I’m wrong.”

Have you noticed any other questions that should be put to His Grace?

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, has said the introduction of some aspects of sharia, Islamic law in Britain, was unavoidable. Other religions enjoyed tolerance of their laws in Britain, he told the BBC, and he called for a “constructive accommodation” with Muslim practice in areas such as marital disputes.

Williams stressed that “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.

“There are ways of looking at marital dispute, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate.” He also said that the argument that “there’s one law for everybody … I think that’s a bit of a danger“.

Talk about opening a can of worms … Who would decide which sharia laws would apply and which would not? Would Muslims be able to choose between the civil and the sharia courts? Could defendants appeal to civil courts if they thought a sharia court decision violated their basic rights? And is Williams right to say there is a danger in having one law for everybody?

What do you think about this?

P.S. — By coincidence, Williams spoke up for sharia on the same day as Britain denied a visa to Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, one of Islam’s leading preachers known for his sermons on the Arabic-language satellite television channel Al Jazeera.