The war within and against the west

Leo

An Islamic, Sharia state does not accept the rights of non-Muslims. If someone becomes becomes a British Citizen, they have to swear an oath of allegiance to the Crown which means they accept the democratic system of government and the fact that the monarch is a Christian. A democratic system does not mean that the majority is always right, it must accept the rights of it’s minorities. In Spain, everyone swears an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, including the King. In America, I assume , no-one can become a citizen without swearing an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. And of course, if someone breaks this oath of allegiance, they must be held accountable. Which leads to the heart of this matter – are these people in breach of their contract of citizenship? Surely the answer is yes, and laws should be passed which make the attack on the constitution illegal. Imprisoning these people is absurd. In extreme cases a there should be policy of re-settlement to a country of their choice i.e. Iran or Saudi Arabia where they can enjoy the Sharia system they so desire.

Leo

Compare this to the case of America Can anyone explain to me why although a President can be charged with crimes against the constitution, no-one else is? I hold it to be self-evident that Sharia law and the American Constitution are incompatible. Democracy does not mean the majority is always right. Majority voting is constrained by constitutional principles. A Constitution is there to prevent the dangers of elected dictatorship, to stop those who would use democracy to dismantle democracy. An American President, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign for perceived crimes against the American Constitution. America fought a Civil War in order to protect the Constitution, in which over half a million people died. Soldiers pledge allegiance to the constitution; is it not time that civilian citizens did as well and were actually held accountable if they broke their pledge? All Americans have citizenship under certain constitutional limits, what is essentially a contract of citizenship. If you try to set up Sharia law does it not mean you have broken your contract of citizenship? Would it not be legal and right for the American Government to revoke that citizenship? If America’s soldiers uphold the constitution isn’t it about time that it’s politicians and lawyers did the same? The first Amendment covers elements of Islam which can genuinely be classified as religious i.e. the right to pray to a deity called Allah. It does not cover elements of Islam which can be genuinely be classified as a political system i.e. Sharia law Should not laws be introduced to defend the constitution, making it compulsory for those who advocate Sharia law to be re-settled in a country of their choice where they can live in a Sharia State?

Verity

Our advanced Western society has had an envied and copied legal code for around a thousand years and it has been the framework for an outstandingly peaceful and cohesive civil society in all that time. It is Labour's trying to castrate it by taking a wrecker's ball to our Constitution and our Bill of Rights that has caused the feral lawlessness in Britain, not any scintilla of inadequacy in our English Common Law, which is the basis for law in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand and Commonwealth countries in Africa. The notion that some desert tribes under the leadership of a cult "prophet" have anything to add to a society which has been stable for hundreds of years and, until the early last century produced nearly all the engineering and technological advances in the world. The solution is to repair the damage the envy-driven socialists have done to our legal system; not adopt something out of the Dark Ages that no one would ever have heard of had our scientists and technologists not found a use for oil, not found a way of refining out, and not found oil in the desert. Their laws are irrelevant and should obtain only in their own societies - from which they all appear to be so determined to flee.

David

Just as Jewish couples can seek religious divorces in the Beth Din court, so Catholics apply for annulments and declarations that previous marriages were invalid at church tribunals. That catholic law differs from national law is well known, especially to divorced Catholics who wish to remarry. This is the case here in Australia, yet there is no demand that catholic law be incorporated into Australian marriage laws, even though Catholics are now the largest religious group in the country.

Ben

For most of history, the British legal system had more in common with Sharia law than with modern-day law. Canon law regulated marriage and much of private life. Cruel punishments such as drawing, burning at the stake, and castration were common. Hanging was standard punishment for petty crimes. English law also had some particularly unjust concepts. The Star Chamber and Bills of Attainder were used to punish those whose real crime was to anger the monarch. Kangaroo courts and Courts Martial were notorious for perpetrating blatant injustices. Perjury by the high born was tolerated as late as the 20th century. The right to speak in ones defense and to cross-examine prosecution witnesses was also a recent phenomenon. And sodomy was a criminal offense as late as the 1960s, and a hanging offense in the 1800's. I haven't even mentioned property law and other laws that discriminated against women. We shouldn't feel overly superior to traditionalist Moslems, though we are entitled to urge upon them the benefits of our own societies' experience.

Mustapha Bunn

Ah,Verity,but they are not fleeing islam........they are in the process of spreading it.

bikhair

"They have never required the host country to change its laws or customs to accommodate them; nor do they set their own religious laws above those of their country."

In America, Dr.Martin Luther King and others in the Civil Rights movement broke the law all the time. Eventually those laws change. Laws really arent set in stone. Besides in democracies people can have all sorts of aspirations provided they are within the law. Even some Muslims are allowed to dream. Or are they?

chevalier

are you making an equivalence between the struggle of black people for equal human rughts and the imposition of sharia law on the Britain by islam?

Merrimac

Can't imagine 'bikhair' really wants us to delve too closely into that reference to the Civil Rights struggle of the American Negroes: they were seeking rights already guaranteed to them under the Constitution but denied to them, in practice, by bigots. As to Islam and its views on racism, Mohammad called the Arabs "the best race", the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam refers to the Umma (community of Moslems) as the best of humanity. Then there's all that business of the Moslem slave trade (Mohammad himself gained slaves as his 'war booty' allotted to him by 'allah'): the Islamic slave trade which began with Mohammad almost 1400 years ago never really ceased, whereas the Western nations' slave trade of Africans endured for approx 300 years and was ended, in part, by the efforts of Christian abolitionists. The Koran, unlike the New Testament, actually mandates for slavery ("possess the necks of your enemies" and "those whom your right hands possess"). As Dr King also stated, when a law is unjust, one has a moral obligation to resist it, or as a naturalised American once famously put it (though nobody ever repeats the entire quote): "My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be made right." That bit about "Even some Moslems can dream" is a perverted reference to Dr King's "I have a dream": Sharia Law qualifies as a nightmare, not a dream.

irene lancaster

Response from Lambeth Palace, when I queried the wisdom of this series when it was first advertised: 'The lecture series has indeed been arranged through the Temple Church and is I think a response to rising concerns about the the extent to which sharia is compatible with english civil law , especially in the extensive Muslim neighbourhoods where informal sharia councils are widely in operation. In areas such as marriage and divorce, there is evidence that there is no proper connection with the civil courts and that women in particular are suffering. Of course I am am aware that there are questions of the side by side relationships of civil and religious law for all religions, and certainly for Judaism. For English Christianity, one could easily argue that the past 500 years has been one in which the interweaving of civil and religious law has been constantly in tension. Even today, of course the civil law remains rooted in Christian understandings, and makes particular provision for the religious provisions of Christianity in general and the Church of England in particular. Interestingly in a few cases the civil law has been amended specifically to accommodate Jewish religious requirements, notably in the case of the amendment to the Divorce (Religions) Act in 2002 which provides for the withholding of a decree nisi until the Beth Din has issued a ‘get’. I think that your comment has truth in it - that some interpretations of sharia are likely to be more intrusive into English legal systems than the legal systems of other faiths and that there is more concern about how far and in what ways it should be accommodated than is the case for other faiths. But I think it is a good thing that this is being debated openly in this kind of series. The Archbishop's lecture is entitled "Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective, and will I am sure range more widely than just sharia. '

Barry Larking

Ben, whom from his spellings I take to be an American, ranges widely over the history of law making in England and Wales, and principles developed from this which have migrated far and wide. However, I see he fails to note haebus corpus, a foundation stone of all liberty. But the main point about this history is its tendency. There have certainly been obstruction and suppression, but the overall direction has been clear. I would contend the same to be true for Islamic sharia law. Here, as I understand it, Islamic rule has been to impose the faith first and foremost over the whole of society in every aspect of life, so that Islamic and un-Islamic have very definite consequences. This in effect is Islam.

Under no circumstances could I allow a parallel to be drawn as between one idea of society and the other. I certainly have no wish to be governed by such Islamic laws or to live in a society which tolerated the philosophy encapsulated within them, which are entirely to impose a theocratic observance on all, be they believers or un-believers. Parallels made here with Judaic or Roman Catholic divorce laws are simply spurious. Islamic laws would cover all matters of conscience, behaviour and action, there being in Islam no distinction between faith and politics.

'Dabbling' is the English vice and in considering the claims of Islamic laws the great and the good are dabbling in 'variety', an abiding contemporary passion especially amongst the leadership. But one must make plain the disaster that awaits English society if it is once conceded that the unchanging and unchangeable precepts of Islam are co-equal with an elaborated common law drawn from precedent and experience.

No, not in my name.

eursoc1

Why does Britain have to suffer permanent change and experiment? If New-Labour had of turned up ten years ago and said: We will change this country out of all recognition, we will debase all of its traditional institutions, we will import vast quantities of people from all over the world, we will subject the country to the dictats of the EU,we will destroy the notion of national identity and heritage, we will spy on our citizens without limit and we will integrate a foreign theocratic law into our own, no one would have ever beleived it possible let alone voted for it. Yet here we are, a thousand years of history, a thousand five hundred years of christianity and the stuggle for personal freedom and independence down the pan in ten years. When are these madmen running our country going to stop treating us like lab rats, fit only for their social and political experiments? When are the comentators and members of the Tory party going to see the thing for what it is, a deliberate revolution and not a "cock-up".