Lessons from the Williams Debacle

Ten years ago, few would have imagined that last week's declaration would be necessary from an Australian Attorney-General. Even fewer would have predicted that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, would advocate the reception of sharia law into Britain's legal system.

While the archbishop's comments have been condemned, and he has released a dissembling "clarification", his position is far from unique. Forty per cent of British Muslims support the reception of sharia into British law. Islamic courts (like Jewish courts) already operate there, though they lack the legal powers of real courts. Advocates need not achieve a political plurality to take the next step. In a country where elections turn on a few percentage points, the temptation for mainstream politicians to accommodate an assertive minority is very real. And Britain's Islamic minority is growing ever more assertive.

Senior judge Sheik Hassan of the Sharia Council, the Islamic court endorsed in Williams's lecture, told Britain's Channel 4: "We know that if sharia laws are implemented then you can change this country into a haven of peace. Because once a thief's hand is cut off, nobody is going to steal. If only once an adulterer is stoned, nobody is going to commit this crime at all. There would be no rapist(s) at all. This is why we say that, yes, we want to offer it to the British society."

Of course, not all sharia advocates endorse these extreme practices, and the archbishop merely advocated that Muslims might voluntarily submit to the jurisdiction of Islamic family and banking law: a submission that echoes a proposal put by Australian Islamic leaders in 2005.

Yet even this would involve state enforcement of the chauvinistic rules of Islamic divorce on women who had "voluntarily" accepted its jurisdiction over their marriage. Such rules would provoke outrage from self-described "hairy lefties" such as Williams, if the responsible faith derived from the cross and not the crescent. As Hassan's comments make clear, a significant minority of British Muslims have adopted the culturally imperialist position that Sharia should supplant existing laws: that British Muslims are colonists bringing civilisation to an infidel land. So why has advocacy of Sharia law been less strident here?

One difference is demographic. The Islamic population recorded in Australia's 2006 census was 1.7 per cent, compared with 2.7 per cent in Britain's 2001 census. The latter is a significant underestimate given the passage of time and notoriously lax British immigration controls. The other difference is Australia's superior record of integrating migrant communities; superior, but far from perfect, as the Cronulla riots and reprisals demonstrate. Integration in Britain has been actively undermined by appeasement. From the absurd (removing The Three Little Pigs from school libraries) to the sinister (purging references to the Holocaust from the history curriculum), Britain has docilely followed Williams's recipe. Such appeasement has only emboldened the most extreme elements of the Islamic community and undermined moderates.

The lesson we should learn from the Williams debacle is how quickly the unthinkable can become thinkable if we tread the path which he happily describes as accommodation. Australians must ensure that our Islamic community is not treated similarly. This requires a greater cultural assertiveness by Australians, impressing on immigrants that they must integrate into the community, not expect it to conform to their beliefs and practices.

Sadly, we appear to be heading in the wrong direction. Attempts to water down the Citizenship Test to reduce modest failure rates are regressive. One may be unconcerned whether new Australians are familiar with the achievements of Donald Bradman, but one should be very concerned if their commitment to integration does not extend even to the simple task of memorising a short booklet of facts.

While integrating first-generation immigrants has always been challenging, Australia has an enviable record of integrating their children. Today, even this is under threat. Students emerge from the contemporary classroom with little sense of ownership of, or loyalty to, the rich historical legacy they have inherited as citizens of Australia and members of a broader Western civilisation. If we cannot offer migrant children a sense of identity deeper than lame platitudes about tolerance and multiculturalism, others will. Those alternative identities may not be compatible with a secular liberal democracy.

The pace of change in the British debate should impress upon us the urgency of inducting new Australians into a meaningful citizenship, one that acknowledges the deep cultural and philosophical roots which gave rise to our freedom and our success.