American laws and American courts should treat the faith of Islam, and the sharia law to which it gives rise, with exactly the same respect—no more and no less—as they afford to the beliefs and practices of any of our many religious communities.

The freedom of religion which we enjoy in the United States is a basic right. It is not, however, an absolute right: the Constitution also gives rights to the states, as representative of the community, which may at times take precedence. Arranged marriages, for example, are legal in this country so long as both parties agree and both parties are of legal age. Or again, a Jehovah’s Witness may refuse medical treatment for himself or herself, but may not do so for a minor child. As in any situation where he or she is not prepared to accept a decision based on the law, an individual has the right to work to change that law, as well as the option to engage in civil disobedience – enduring the consequences that follow.

Those in this country who practice religion should, then, have the maximum freedom to follow their particular practices while at the same time living under the common constraints that govern all who live here. When a conflict arises between the interests of the state and those of a believer, the state must demonstrate (in court) why its interests (and thus those of the American people as a whole) should prevail; unless it can do this the Constitution clearly favors the freedom of the individual.

The archbishop’s statements have drawn a wide and heated response. Your question itself reaches a conclusion that his statement carefully avoided making: that sharia is “the body of Islamic religious law.” The archbishop’s lecture was long, dense, and certainly inadequately explicated. It left far too much to the hearer or reader’s imagination as to his actual intent. (For example, he spoke about “domestic issues”: it would have been helpful, given the widespread concern in western cultures about the rights of women under sharia, to know much more precisely what he meant by this). Further, it would seem that he went well beyond his avowed intention of “open(ing) up some of these wider matters,” as he proceeded to suggest the framework of an actual proposal to deal with the (admittedly always knotty) question of how best and most effectively to incorporate diverse communities into a pluralistic society.

But the assertion that some commentators have made that the archbishop simply proposed a separate legal system for the followers of Islam, without reference to, and apart from, the great and ancient tradition of English common law, is, intentionally or unintentionally, a distortion of what he actually said.