Introduction: the Archbishop’s lecture in February 2008

The application of Islamic law generally in the UK has become a publically contentious issue since early 2008 when Dr Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, gave his lecture, ‘Civil and Religious law in England: a Religious Perspective’. The lecture was intended to be a consideration of the religious aspects to the question posed early on by the Archbishop: ‘what level of public or legal recognition if any might be allowed to the legal provisions of a religious group’? In attempting to answer this question the Archbishop recognised that it applied to all religious groups, but as the lecture was the foundation lecture for a series of debates on ‘Islam in English Law,’ his concern was predominantly with the issues thrown up by the fact that a very sizable Muslim community was now living in the UK with very different cultural and religious allegiances from those of the majority of the population.

The Archbishop outlined what he saw as the ‘broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state’ but he recognised that ‘there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes’. In essence the Archbishop outlined his idea that the state should consider moving beyond the present legally positivist system, which he characterised as an ‘unqualified secular monopoly’, to a system in which there would be some form of accommodation of religious or cultural norms. He saw individuals in modern society as having multiple and sometimes overlapping allegiances and castigated as ‘very unsatisfactory’ the view that ‘to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state in such a way that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice’.