Brittain v Islamism

The mouse has roared. In his new book Reimagining Britain, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has said that Sharia should never become part of the British legal system because it is incompatible with our laws.
High levels of Muslim immigration, he says, have led many to challenge majority values, especially in family life. He wants Britain instead to uphold the values founded upon its own principles and Christian inheritance.
The Church of England upholding Christian values as preferable to those of another faith? There will surely be amazement in Heaven. It’s certainly a reversal of the position taken by the archbishop’s predecessor, Lord Williams, who said in 2008 that he backed the introduction of Sharia in Britain and argued that adopting some of its aspects seemed “unavoidable”.
Those few churchmen who have taken a robust stand against incorporating Islamic precepts into Britain have been denounced as sowing unnecessary division. In 2004 Lord Williams’s predecessor, Lord Carey, said that although the vast majority of Muslims were “honourable and good people who hate violence”, Islam stood in opposition to “practically every other world religion”. For this he came under fire from within his own church for “rattling the cage”.
Although Sharia has no legal authority in Britain, there are many Muslim enclaves where its writ runs. This is despite its anti-western principles, such as the death penalty for apostasy, punishments for homosexuality and the profound disadvantages and threats to personal safety meted out to British Muslim women. This all led the European Court of Human Rights to state in 2003 that “Sharia is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy”.

Yet Britain has allowed it nevertheless to develop as a parallel form of jurisdiction, in practice if not in law. This is due to a combination of fear and confusion over how to deal with minorities. Multiculturalism, which has held sway for decades, affords equal status to all cultures. Yet respect for human life, equality for women, freedom of speech and worship and so on, are not universal but western values rooted in the Bible.