COMMENT Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is one of the most thoughtful people in British public life. But his call for aspects of Muslim legal practice, or Sharia law, to be recognised as a “supplementary jurisdiction” in English law is badly muddled.
He is quite right to say we need to think about how the law applies in a plural society of overlapping identities. But he comes close to dismissing the rule of law as “abstract universalism”. The rule of law is not divisible in the way he suggests.
