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Two statements on Shariah, made in February and March of this year by two prominent leaders in the UK and US have generated a storm of protest and praise. Both the statements and the reaction they generated are of interest to the students of history and Western civilization. They help us gauge the state of religious freedom and open mindedness in the Western world today.

The first was from Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, who suggested that for some personal matters like marriage and divorce Muslims in the UK could be allowed to be governed by the Shariah. He did not suggest that all personal matters for Muslims in the UK be so governed. He would pick and choose which personal matters would be so privileged and which would not, in effect awarding the right to second guess the Shariah to the Church of England whose law is an integral part of the law in the UK. Islam’s inheritance laws, for example, would not be permitted under his proposal.

Of course, to propose even this much he had to say that the Shariah was not all that bad after all, despite all the propaganda against it. He wrote: “In conclusion, it seems that if we are to think intelligently about the relations between Islam and British law, we need a fair amount of 'deconstruction' of crude oppositions and mythologies, whether of the nature of sharia or the nature of the Enlightenment.” In other words we have told a lot of lies about the Shariah for all these centuries. Now the circumstances require us to engage with the Muslims in a different manner and therefore we have to acknowledge some of our lies and distortions as lies and distortions.

The response to this modest proposal was a tsunami of protests and condemnations. There were calls from wide areas of British media and leadership for retraction and even resignation by the archbishop.

The second statement came from Harvard Law professor and Islamic expert Noah Feldman in an article in the New York Times in March. Feldman who reportedly is fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew, has deep interests in the Muslim world. He worked as a consultant for the occupation in Iraq and drafted the constitutions of occupied Iraq and occupied Afghanistan. He keeps a close eye on the developments in the Muslim world and knows that the people there have been longing for the rule of Shariah. He wants to satisfy this thirst without giving up the objectives of occupation. For this he has come up with a brilliant two-step approach. One, acknowledge that Shariah has had a bad press and that it has been a source of good in the past. Two, practically take all that praise back by suggesting that today Shariah is no longer a viable option in the form it has been applied in the past. Today it will have to be implemented using secular institutions manned by non-scholars. He tactfully presents this proposition so it appears that this is not something being imposed by a colonial master. Rather this state has been arrived at by the doings of the Muslim societies and leaders themselves.

Naturally, like Williams, he had to praise the Shariah for its past glory. He noted that Shariah meant rule of law and was responsible for the check on the powers of the rulers. “Without Shariah, there would have been no Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad, no golden age of Muslim Spain, no reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul.” His article also generated a storm of criticism in the US.