London, Feb 12, IRNA A Muslim human rights group has condemned the mass hysteria provoked against the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams following his call for Britain to accommodate some aspects of Sharia law for the country’s two million Muslim population.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) said it was ‘shocked by what seems to be a systematic and malicious misunderstanding of what the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his speech about accommodating religious minorities in Britain’.
“This has led to an unprecedented vicious attack on a leading religious figure in Britain,” it said after Williams has been forced to twice clarify his comments following the continuation of a wave of hysteria for the past four days.
“The fact that the head of the Anglican Church cannot say something positive in support of the legitimate needs of Muslims without being vilified highlights that Islam and Muslims are not considered equal in this society,” said IHRC chair Massoud Shadjareh.
In a presidential address to the Church of England Synod on Monday, the Archbishop of Canterbury defended his remarks on the way the British legal system might accommodate Islamic law, while also speaking about the distress caused to the wider public.
On Friday, he also spoke out against the wave of hysteria in the media and elsewhere over his call for Britain when clarifying that his aim was to ‘to ease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state’.
Last week, the IHRC also expressed shock at the level and nature of reactions raised, saying they had raised the specter of hudood punishments in a ‘nonsensical manner’.
“Claims by commentators that these comments undermine the idea of one law for all suggest either a lack of knowledge of the British legal system as it is, or a deliberate misrepresentation of it,” the London-based commission said.
“The Synod itself is a form of religious court with its own jurisdiction. Beth Din courts for the Jewish community have existed for hundred of years,” it said, putting the accommodation of other religions in the UK into context.
Many Muslims, notably women, already have access to Sharia councils in Britain, as the Jewish community does with Beth Din courts, for issues of marriage, divorce and inheritance.
The IHRC said its research showed that enshrining these rulings in the law would give Muslims a greater sense of legal status as citizens of Britain.