Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I The Archbishop of Canterbury and shariʽa law
- Part II The Archbishop’s proposal for ‘transformative accommodation’
- Shariʽa and secular democracy: is Islamic law compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights?
- Legal pluralism: should English law give greater recognition to Islamic law?
- Accommodation or conflict: trajectories in the United Kingdom
- 12 Religious rights and the public interest
- Part III Responsibilities and rights
- Part IV Prospect: equality before God and before the law
- Select bibliography
- Index of cases
- Index
- References
12 - Religious rights and the public interest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I The Archbishop of Canterbury and shariʽa law
- Part II The Archbishop’s proposal for ‘transformative accommodation’
- Shariʽa and secular democracy: is Islamic law compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights?
- Legal pluralism: should English law give greater recognition to Islamic law?
- Accommodation or conflict: trajectories in the United Kingdom
- 12 Religious rights and the public interest
- Part III Responsibilities and rights
- Part IV Prospect: equality before God and before the law
- Select bibliography
- Index of cases
- Index
- References
Summary
‘Transformative accommodation’: retrospect
Dr Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, aimed in ‘Civil and Religious Law’ ‘to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state, with a few thoughts about what might be entailed in crafting a just and constructive relationship between Islamic law and the statutory law of the United Kingdom’. It is time to revisit the Archbishop’s own – tentative and provisional – suggestions for the future. Dr Williams drew upon the work of the legal theorist Ayelet Shachar:
It might be possible to think in terms of what [Shachar] calls ‘transformative accommodation’: a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that ‘power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents’ … Hence ‘transformative accommodation’: both jurisdictional parties may be changed by their encounter over time, and we avoid the sterility of mutually exclusive monopolies. It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a ‘market’ element, a competition for loyalty as Shachar admits.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Islam and English LawRights, Responsibilities and the Place of Shari'a, pp. 188 - 204Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013