Addressing the Taboos

In February 2008 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, became immersed in an intense controversy. There were calls for his resignation, with some calling him a 'disaster for the Church of England'. The critics came not only from the ranks of the liberals but also from among the conservatives in the Anglican Communion, all three leading political parties, fellow Christians in other denominations, Jews, and even some Muslims. At the heart of the controversy was the Archbishop's speech to the legal community in the UK in which he had argued for adoption of parts of Sharia – Islamic law – in Britain. For a book which aims at proposing an analytical grid for studying and understanding the role of religion in development, an examination of the Archbishop's proposal and the ensuing critiques illuminates the challenges development theory and practice confront in accommodating religion within their ambit.

In his speech, the Archbishop tried to address what to him was an important modern-day challenge: how to accommodate the demands of minority religious communities who want to exercise the option to be ruled on certain issues by their religious legal systems? Drawing on the case of some members of the Muslim communities in the UK who argued for freedom to live under Sharia law, he addressed the generic question of what level of public and legal recognition, if any, might be allowed to the legal provisions of a religious group.

While acquiescent to the fact that there are no easy solutions, he proposed a 'transformative accommodation' between secular and religious legal systems enabling the two to coexist. This, in his view, did not imply setting up a parallel legal system to British law. Rather it entailed formulating a scheme in which individuals retained the opportunity to choose the jurisdiction under which they would seek to resolve certain carefully chosen matters. The Archbishop maintained that this would force the religious and secular leaders to compete for the loyalty of shared constituents. The proposal involved accommodating religious law on a case-by-case basis where the legally recognized religious precepts did not interfere with the liberties guaranteed by state law in the society in question.

The justification for such a proposal was the recognition that social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging; people have multiple identities and affiliations. The modern secular state, when assuming a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity, creates as serious a problem as do religious communities in viewing religious identity as the only significant category. For the Archbishop, it is unrealistic to believe that to be a citizen is essentially and simply to be under the rule of the uniform law of a sovereign state. The secular position, which holds that any other relations, commitments or protocols of behaviour belong exclusively to the realm of the private and of individual choice, is untenable (see Chapter 3):

It would be a pity if immense advances in the recognition of human rights led, because of a misconception about legal universality, to a situation where a person was defined primarily as the possessor of a set of abstract liberties and the law's function was accordingly seen as nothing but the securing of those liberties irrespective of the custom and conscience of those groups which concretely compose a plural modern society. (Archbishop's lecture, February 2008)

The Archbishop, in simple words, was arguing for respecting people's religious commitments and carving out greater spaces to accommodate religious precepts within the secular system if the secular state was to win the full allegiance of religious communities.

For his critics, however, the proposal, or even the mere discussion of such demands, was outrageous. For them, the mention of Sharia raised instant references to repression of women, archaic and brutal physical punishments and a pre-modern system with no human rights. How could the Archbishop argue for tolerance of such values within a progressive Western society, inquired over 17,000 hostile viewers flooding the BBC's online message board?

Michael Nazir Ali, the Pakistan-born Bishop of Rochester, on the other hand, noted the practical challenge to such a proposal: 'Every school of Shariah law would be in conflict with British law on matters like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, the custody of children, the laws of inheritance and of evidence so how would consensus be evolved?' The toughest challenge to the Archbishop's proposal came from a group of columnists in The Times online edition, who questioned whether Sharia was something that could be cherry-picked. Can we say that we will engage with certain aspects of Sharia, or any religious system, and not with others? And, if yes, which criteria should we use to distinguish the religious precepts that we see as 'good' to engage with from those that are 'bad'?

The issues raised by the debate between the Archbishop and his furious critics do not relate only to how Western societies are to accommodate the public presence of religion in their midst; they also arise in developing countries and especially in their relation to Western donors. As this book will illustrate, there are many parallels to be drawn between the above story and the reality of development practice in developing countries, such as the controversy surrounding secular and religious understandings of women's empowerment or the controversy surrounding religious education and its rejection of non-religious subjects.

In its essence, the Sharia law controversy in Britain captures the Gordian knot that needs to be untangled in order to find ways for development theory and practice to deal with the presence of religion in the public sphere. In the Introduction we identified five questions that the reality of development work in developing countries confronts (see p. 7). This chapter briefly examines each of these questions as they relate to development theory and practice. Our purpose here is not to put forward a set of satisfactory responses that can be accepted by all, for disagreement is a characteristic hallmark whenever the subject of the appropriate role of religion in the public sphere is concerned. Instead, our purpose is to demonstrate, through a variety of examples, that the reality of development work makes these questions unavoidable. They have to be addressed. The fact that they lack straightforward answers is not a sufficient warrant for not asking them. Some case studies help us illuminate the terms of debate. They also point out that, given the empirical reality, some answers to the above questions are more appropriate than others.

Is religion relevant?

Is religion still a powerful force in the public sphere, worthy of serious academic engagement, or is it bound to disappear as societies reach higher levels of economic and...