By IRNA
London : Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has spoken out against the wave of hysteria in the media and elsewhere over his call for Britain to accommodate some aspects of Sharia law for the country’s two million Muslim population.
The archbishop said he made “no proposals for Sharia” in either the lecture or the interview on Thursday and “certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law.”
My core aim was to “to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state” and was using Sharia as an example, he said in a statement on his office’s website.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) condemned the “hysterical misrepresentations” of his remarks, saying they served “only to drive a wedge between British people.”
The popularist Sun went as far as describing the spiritual leader of the Church of England as a “dangerous threat to the nation” but the MCB said “British Muslims are not calling for creation of different legal systems, nor is the Archbishop.”
“British Muslims would wish to seek parity with other faiths in particular the followers of the Jewish faith in the United Kingdom in facilitating choices for those who wish, as Muslims, for their personal relationships to be governed by a Sharia civil code,” the umbrella Muslim organization said.
In his lecture on Civil and Religious Law in England, Williams spoke of the way the very term sharia is not only misunderstood, but is the focus of much fear and anxiety. He also warned “sensational reporting of opinion polls” clouds the issue.