Canterbuy Tale
Interesting news today that the Archbishop of Canterbury has called for possible incorporation of Sharia law (so-called Islamic law) into the British legal code. That's before the backlash. At first blush this seems like a brilliant idea, and quite legally progressive in the sense that it reflects the change in the demographics of the country. Moreover it would only be in place for family law cases and some financial dealings. But in retrospect I'm not quite sure. The legal code of a country is more deeply embedded than that and demographic shifts may not be sufficient for such a radical change (we're talking about legal systems that come from two different sources). More importantly which parts of so-called Islamic law do you put into practice?
Looking for more recent examples of such a nesting of legal systems, I hard pressed to think of anything more recent than the Ottoman empire at the turn of the century. Prior to the reforms forced by movements such as the Young Turks, non-Muslims in the Ottoman Levant were allowed to govern themselves by whatever laws their religions mandated as dhimmi communities. Hence the Jewish community in Damascus in 1890 (for example) could marry, divorce, inherit, etc, based on the laws of their faith - so long as they paid their taxes. Yet such an example may not necessarily be easily transferred to a modern democracy where human and civil rights are explicitly guaranteed in the constitution or other founding documents. In order to ensure equality for all its citizens such a system perforce has to be less complete and more generic.
Still it is an intriguing idea, and one of the more interesting by-products of such a decision would be the more wide-spread teaching of the Islamic jurisprudence system in British univerisities. I would think that this would lead to some better cultural understanding of the Muslim world. Hopefully it would lead folks in the Muslim world to realize that this is a two way street - but who knows?