Saturday, May 24, 2008

H.D.S. Greenway on Muslims in the West: When faith and culture collide

When faith and culture collide - The Boston Globe

"While Jews, after centuries of struggle and the Holocaust, have been successful in carving out a religious space within the legal codes of Europe, Muslims have not caught up. More than one European Muslim told me that they could learn from the Jews about what Williams calls "overlapping affiliations (that) work for the common good."

""What most people think they know of Sharia is that it is repressive toward women, and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishment," Williams said. He quoted a Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, as saying that in the West, "the idea of Sharia calls up the darkest images of Islam." But Williams hopes there can be compromises and ways to accommodate a "constructive relationship" between Islamic law and the statutory laws of the United Kingdom without compromising traditional British freedoms.

""The great protest of the Enlightenment," he said, "was against authority that appealed only to one tradition." And that could apply to both Islam and Christendom."

No comments: