It's easy to collapse the debate about sharia law into simple tribalism. It comes to stand as a proxy for whether you think Muslims and their ways are good, or bad. One way out of that swamp was attempted last year by the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he argued that, like it or not, sharia law was here and must be recognised as much as any other form of private arbitration in English law. At least he proved that it is unwise to clamber from a swamp into a minefield.
So is there any other way to move the debate? One question might be to ask what this debate shows us about the limits of individualism. Liberal discussion of sharia tends to assume that the really important question is whether it is practised between consenting adults. That may be a helpful way to think about such things as sadomasochism (the obvious comments here taken as read, thanks) in the context of things like Operation Spanner. But it looks quite unrealistic in the context of community pressures, where the adults involved are clearly not autonomous individuals considering only their own best interests. Whether they should strive to become such creatures is another question, but most liberal thought ignores it.
Still, it is worth thinking about whether there is something wrong with a general theory that so completely fails to describe a particular situation. Perhaps the autonomous adult is an idealisation, useful for some purposes, but misleading for others.
But there is another way the debate might move, too: tomorrow we publish, pseudonymously, an account by a Muslim woman of a couple of ways in which sharia law has actually worked in her life; the moral is that counting tribunals is the wrong way to ask about its influence. It is much more powerful and less formal than anything which takes place in open court. It is a way for clans and extended families to regulate their affairs and no one inside such a network thinks of themselves as an autonomous consumer. A law that works there is entirely beyond the reach of the formal systems that Dr Williams and, later, Lord Phillips were talking about. It's probably also beyond the reach of many mosques. What will weaken it, or make it more just, is education, experience, and time.
