ABSTRACT
This chapter is a response to the widely reported speech by the chief cleric of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on 7 February 2008.1 It is an attempt to place the current debate on Muslims and the law in the UK within a wider jurisprudential frame of reference. The response to Dr Williams’ suggestions was already predetermined by certain constraints, subsequently characterized by Tariq Ramadan (2008) as ‘psychological’, rather than ‘historical’ or ‘normative’. Ramadan sees the constraints as primarily to do with the mental images provoked by references to the shari’a in the West. While there is certainly a psychological element of fear present in the responses to Dr Williams’ lecture, it is possible to include both historical and normative limits to explain the constraints a legal system faces in its attempt to ‘integrate’ non-national ‘others’, in this case Muslims and shari’a, within its frame of reference. These limits can be seen to operate in various interrelated fields, and are typified by the contemporary scope of legal comparativism, the limited historical perspective through which law is conceived, the educational and jurisprudential orthodoxies that dominate the scene, and a judicial system that seems too tied to positivism to be responsive enough to the socio-legal field.
