Bunt the bollocks into touch
Whereas Madeleine Bunting, discussing sharia, is right that it is an enormous body of law, not just handchopping and stoning adulterous women, she makes a mistake of equivalence.Sharia is not a system of law like ours. It is not a painstakingly developed, shared code, which is "interpreted" differently in different places. It's based on one man's vision and how that vision was reported. It's quite important to understand that, and to be clear that that man lived a long time ago, and not in a nice, progressive society.
Bunting says:
Don't get me wrong, there are some exceptionally horrible elements of how sharia has been interpreted
But there is no problem with how sharia has been interpreted. The handchopping is in there. So is the homophobia, the womanhating, the whole caboodle. It's not a big bundle of loving tolerance that has been badly interpreted by some longbearded nutters. They have interpreted it exactly correctly. The differences in sharia from one place to the other are not about interpretation so much as about what sources it is built from. But the fundamentals are agreed because no school of Islamic jurisprudence disagrees on the Qur'an as a foundation and all agree on a set of hadiths. The differences of opinion are similar to differences of opinion in Western law; you could compare Franco-Roman law with English law: they're different but the principles that guide them are not so different, so that they give similar, although not identical outcomes.
The closest comparison to sharia is not Western law and its processes but Mosaic law and Western processes as they existed about a thousand years ago. Sharia law is rather like Anglo-Saxon law. Dude, we moved on from that! They haven't.
Why is Bunting even writing about it? Because some Muslims want sharia in the UK (just for themselves though, not for all of us). And the likes of Dave Cameron have stepped in to say no cheers.
I say no cheers too. That shit's horrible. No cultural relativism on this score round here. It is not just as good as our law, and one of the good things about our law is that in principle it applies to everyone. We all get the same rights. Not a bit less because you're a chick, Jewish or you fucked your neighbour last week.
But surely they should be allowed to live how they choose? Yeah, fair enough. But not everyone gets to choose, do they? Not even rich Westerners can easily choose what system they want to live under, and it becomes a lot harder for people who are marginalised. You know who I mean. The usual suspects: the poor, those without power, women. If someone makes your community live under sharia, and you don't have the means to leave that community, you are stuck with it. I prefer to extend the protections of our law, such as they are.
posted by Dr Zen @ 5:34 pm
2 Comments:
The principle of equality under the law is simply not negotiable. If an exception were to be made on cultural or religious grounds, the whole principle would disappear in a puff of smoke and be irretrievable. And while we may not much care if Muslims flog each other over lending money or wearing a burqa, by relinquishing the universal rule of law we leave ourselves wide open to any abuse. There are, let's not forget, far more powerful interests than Islam in our societies, who would be only too happy to opt out of some parts of the law. What if rich people stopped paying tax, or companies canned labour laws? All right, they do to some extent already, but what if they were doing so with the blessing of the law?
As you know, I entirely agree. I don't mind changes in the law to accommodate others: so that maybe killing chickens in a particular way might become legal, but compartmentalising our law is fundamentally wrong. The notion that we are "in it together" is central to a society, or a nation. If we are not, we are not a thing, just people within particular borders.
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