Islamic Sharia Council criticises Baroness Cox
18 June 2011
Muslims are engaging actively in politics at various levels.
The Islamic Sharia Council has attacked Baroness Cox’s Sharia Bill and claimed that “it is indeed a crime that Lady Cox has made no attempt to understand the workings of the shariah councils.”
The proposed Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill would make it a criminal offence for Sharia courts to falsely claim legal jurisdiction over criminal or family law. Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, has been a courageous campaigner for Christian rights and he supports this Bill saying that: “The problem with Sharia is that it is inherently unequal for certain kinds of people.”
We are not sanguine that this approach will work. Equalities legislation is being used to beat Christians, and we do not think that it is Christian to use the same stick to beat muslims. There is an inherent weakness in equalities legislation which tries to decree equality where there is none. One would think that George Orwell had never written “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. Have we not learned any lessons from this? Neither do we know what safeguards are in this Bill for Christian churches to uphold scriptural teaching on families and the relationship of the sexes.
Dr Nazir-Ali justly criticizes Sharia law as introducing “a principle of contradiction in the body of the law which will cause problems for the country and for people who will suffer, particularly women.” However this contradiction already exists in Britain which has different administrations of law competing with each other. It is true that we should not add to the confusion, but ever since the moral basis of UK law departed from the Judaeo-Christian framework of the Bible we have had secular morality competing with Christian morality, the sovereignty of the people competing with the sovereignty of God. Thankfully, the contest is unequal, but many people will be damaged in the process.
There are a plethora of muslim teachers and councils - the Islamic Sharia Council, the Muslim Council of Great Britain - who promote muslim doctrine. The answer is not to criminalise their religious doctrine but for Christians to expose its inadequacy for the human soul by promoting the Christian alternative.
That is the religious perspective. However, from the civil and criminal point of view, whereas many muslims engage with our society, there are those who do not. This manifests itself in various ways. Extremism and terrorism are only one form and these are legitimately within the province of civil government; and The Muslim Parliament of Great Britain is another. Its mission statement is: “Working towards creating an informed, caring and morally upright Muslim community ready to engage with its environment at all levels.” This is not a Christian community. The Muslim Manifesto authored mainly by the founder of the Muslim Parliament states: “Islam created a political platform from which Muslims were to launch themselves on a global role as founders of great states, empires and a world civilization and culture.” This is a religious agenda, coupled with a secular one employing politics. Our civil government may legitimately take cognisance of this, but it cannot fight the religious argument with civil sanctions. It is the duty of the government of this Christian kingdom to defend its Christian constitution and to support the Christian Church and our Christian institutions. The choice is therefore plain - we need to defend our Christian constitution or we will succumb either to the Humanist Manifesto or The Muslim Manifesto of the Muslim Parliament, or some other religious manifesto. The Liberal Democrat Shirley Williams once boasted that through the European Economic Community, as it then was, the social policy of Britain will become Roman Catholic.
It is correct that UK law should reflect Christian teaching, but Christian teaching does not try to make equal what is not equal. Legislators may try to do so but they will fail.
Rather, Christians believe in winning the battle of ideas with the sword of truth rather than the blunt stick of punishment. The Gospel will triumph over law - a change of heart is more useful than trying to “convince a man against his will” who has “the same opinion still”. The difficulty is that there are not enough public figures advocating Christian regeneration and grace in the public domain, nor exposing the effete, false theology which had brought religion, and Christianity with it, into disrepute.
