At the University of Wisconsin, I am advising a very bright and talented undergraduate student who is writing what I expect to be a fascinating Honors Senior Thesis on Muslims and multiculturalism in Britain and Israel.
I e-mailed her today to draw her attention to a controversial new proposal made by the archbishop of Canterbury, who "called Thursday for Britain to adopt aspects of Islamic Shariah law alongside the existing legal system" -- specifically, in family law. I don't know if the archbishop of Canterbury described his proposal as a form of multiculturalism, but it is arguably in the spirit of multiculturalism. More grist for her thesis mill.
Interestingly enough – despite the tendency within certain circles in Britain to denounce Israel (incorrectly, in my view) as an expression of Western colonialism – Israel already has a legal arrangement like the one that the Most Rev. Rowan Williams is now advocating for his own country. Here in Israel, a system of religious courts regulates matters of personal status (e.g., marriage, divorce, etc.) according to the religious law of the individuals who are concerned. In addition to Muslim religious courts, I believe there are also Druze, Christian, and of course Jewish courts. (It is because of this arrangement that there is no civil marriage in Israel.) Personally, I am highly critical of this system, and I believe it needs to be reformed, but I find it amusingly ironic that Israel is in some respects more multicultural than Britain.
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3 comments:
So the only way one can get married (or divorced) in Israel is through a religious body? Are the atheists just supposed to pick the least offensive one, then? (My mother-in-law, by the way, wanted only one piece of input re: Rich & my wedding -- that we not get married in a church).
Regarding state, church and multiculturalism: The Minister of Education in Sweden (a member of the Liberal party) announced yesterday that he was going to put forth a motion that would (if passed) set up a state-supported Imam school in Sweden. This in an era when the Swedish (Lutheran) Church has become more and more independant, and has not been a state church since 2000 (priests are only partially educated in state-funded universities, I believe). The minister framed it both as a potential buffer against radical Islam, but also as a 'rights' issue.
On the one hand, this is not particularly surprising, given Sweden's approach to (multicultural) integration -- i.e. the principle of 'freedom of choice,' that immigrants (and speaking of Islam in Sweden is largely a matter of 1st & 2nd generation immigrants/refugees) should have the freedom to choose how much to integrate. In practice, this is not just a statement of non-interference by the state, but a positive support for immigrants/refugees who want to maintain their own way of life. On the other hand, this is at a time when a lot of the earlier policies of integration (such as the lack of a language requirement for citizenship) have come increasingly under attack -- from the Liberals no less.
This makes me suspect that the first reason Leijonborg gave (a desire to prevent/dampen radical Islam), rather than the multicultural rights one, is the driving concern.
In any case, it's certainly an interesting move on the Liberals part -- although now I'm realizing how little this has to do with your original post (oops, sorry). Maybe I should just go blog on this on my own ;-)
Carly, as I understand it, atheists are out of luck in Israel, which is one of the problems with this arrangement. In practice, secular Israelis can evade the difficulty by getting married abroad, but of course that's hardly an equitable solution.
Interesting about the proposal for a state-supported Imam school in Sweden. It brings to mind the national council of Muslims that the French government established in 2003 to create what Nicolas Sarkozy (then the Interior Minister) called "an official Islam of France," integrate French Muslims, and discourage their radicalization. There is an interesting historical parallel there with the consistory system that Napoleon created to integrate French Jews (again under the watchful supervision of the state) in the nineteenth century, though there were no concerns about radicalism in that case.
By the way, I added a link in my blog to yours. Sorry for neglecting to add it before - I think it was a breach of the tacit norms of the blogosphere. :-)
Postscript: The Knesset just voted down two bills that would have made civil marriages possible in Israel.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3506428,00.html
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