I came across some news from a few months ago in the International Herald Tribune (titled: Integrating Islam into the West) about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suggestion in a lecture that Britain should adopt certain aspects of Shariah law. This controversy has been making the rounds throughout Europe and North America over the last years, and so far, there have been few substantial results. Nevertheless, I found the article's points about the comments of the Most Reverend Rowan Williams relatively thought provoking. Apparently, the real fear of accepting elements of "minority" law is that you can create "states within states" and that the secular state will no longer have sufficient authority. There are 1.8 million Muslims in Britain, and "Britain is struggling to find a way of accommodating its increasingly ghettoized and radicalized Muslim population." Similar questions have been raised in Ontario specifically when the Attorney General there proposed Shariah for family law disputes. Interestingly, the IHT article makes a concluding comment that "the real reason for Europe's failure to integrate Islam is the European commitment to secularism."
