Saturday, February 16, 2008

Anne Applebaum ["A Craven Canterbury Tale," op-ed, Feb. 12] has a very strange way of reporting on things she claims to have read. What Archbishop Rowan Williams said in concluding his lecture "Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective," as well as things he said repeatedly in the course of that lecture, disproved Applebaum's concerns about sharia law.

At the end of the speech, Williams said 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." For Applebaum to insist that the archbishop's recommendations will further female circumcision or forced marriages shows that she has not read what he repeatedly said: Those matters arise from cultural practices, not religious prescriptions.

Archbishop Williams seeks a path whereby the rights of believers can be protected within the larger British community without unreasonable demands being made upon the members of that community. Applebaum prefers to repeat ignorant claims about Muslim practices and to denigrate the followers of a religion on the basis of such falsehoods.

-- Charles E. Butterworth

Washington