I wasn't talking about occupation. I meant in terms of immigration. If you move to a country there are laws that you are supposed to abide. Not for you to forgo or change to your own taste.
It's not so much that our laws are superior but our laws are our laws. And if Sharia becomes law, then our laws aren't our laws. It sends out the wrong message.
This may be a taste of our own medicine according to DC but still, it's not good for the country or the people to be told that one set of peoples (foreigners) has a different, more lenient set of laws than another group of peoples (natives) living in the same country.
If we cater to foreigners before ourselves we will find chip shops and all the other good food gone. And being British will mean less and less. And British law will be a mongrel called British-Islamic-?-? law filled with double standards and holes.
I don't have any issue with foreigners btw but on this one issue I think national identity needs to be preserved and Sharia law is just another way that Britishness is being amalgamated into something unrecognisable.
Rimmer also makes a good point that faith has no basis in the reality of law. Even native faith, never mind the faith(s) of others.
..........The debate rolls on....
Friday February 8,
The
Archbishop of Canterbury may be under fire from the entire British press, not to mention
Gordon Brown's Cabinet, for saying that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law in Britain seems 'unavoidable', but he has gained some new friends in Oxford. Among the comments he made on the BBC Radio's
World At One, was a virtually unreported reference to a growing row in the university town over the local mosque's desire to broadcast, via loudspeaker, daily 'calls for prayer'.
Dr Williams said that while accommodation of a periodic call from the minaret at a mosque in Oxford might be possible, a daily call to prayer in "a mixed community which will never be homogeneously Muslim... doesn't seem to be appropriate".
Oxford Central Mosque applied before Christmas for permission to have a Mohammedan muezzin use a loudspeaker system to summon the faithful to prayer three times a day. The plan caused immediate uproar among local residents who claim that the sound would be inappropriately intrusive among Oxford's dreaming spires.
One resident told the
Oxford Mail: "The proposal to issue a prayer call is very un-neighbourly, especially in a crowded urban space such as Oxford. I have lived in the Middle East and a prayer call has a very different feel to church bells and I personally found the noise extremely unpleasant, rather disturbing and very alien to the Western mindset."
Another, responding to the fact that the calls would include - in Arabic - the line, 'There is no God but Allah', said: "I do not want preaching at. It is not the tradition of this country or the tradition I subscribe to."
The Archbishop's words - if they get heard above the din surrounding his other comments - will come as some relief, especially after the novelist and critic
Philip Hensher entered the debate, claiming in the
Independent that Oxford was "famously self-absorbed" and asking: "Can it really be true that nobody would find charm, interest and perhaps even some beauty in the call to prayer echoing, once a week, across its domes and spires?"
Which is all very romantic, but it's not 'once a week' the mosque is asking for, it three times a day.
