Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican Communion, doubtless thought he was making a positive contribution to interfaith relations when he gave a speech on February 7 suggesting that some form of official recognition in Britain for elements of sharia--Islamic religious law--is "unavoidable." But his remarks were shocking to many of his flock. Only four days later, Archbishop Williams, insisting he'd been misunderstood, blamed "our current style of electronic global communication" for the ensuing uproar. He refused to retract what he had said.

Britons--some 3 percent of whom are Muslims--were disturbed by more than Williams's naiveté. Many Muslim immigrants came to the West to escape the excesses of Islamic ideology in countries like Pakistan, where extremism is advancing. Imposition of sharia could deny these immigrants' children opportunities to become successful in British society or elsewhere in the West.

What the archbishop ignored is that British Muslim radicals raise the demand for sharia as an ideological banner. They hope to separate Muslims from their non-Muslim neighbors, the easier to recruit and indoctrinate believers for jihadism. George Carey, Rowan Williams's predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, warned in the Sunday Telegraph of February 10 that sharia might perpetuate Muslim ghettoes in Britain.

But sharia is not a sound-bite topic. Paradoxically, ignorance of sharia among non-Muslims is matched by a similar void among the radical agitators, who chiefly seek publicity with their demands and threats. Unschooled in Islamic law, they equate sharia with their own improvised notions of religious justice. In reality, sharia is

One aspect of sharia governs religious customs that are not normally the subject of public law in the West--things like diet, prayer, burial, and zakat, the obligatory contribution for relief of the poor. Non-Muslims need not be concerned about, say, clerical supervision of the slaughtering of meat. In this limited sense, sharia already functions on a voluntary basis in Britain and wherever Muslims live, and poses no threat to Western legal systems.

Indeed, under British and American protections for the free exercise of religion, some religious believers are already granted exemptions for certain principles and practices of their faith so long as they do not interfere with the good order of society (Sikh policemen in Britain may wear turbans, conscientious objectors to war or abortion are not required to participate in those acts, and so on).

Further, a "shadow sharia" already exists in Britain: informal courts, usually handling family matters or alleged apostasy, that impose forcible marriage and divorce. But sharia fanatics call for something more: They want the public enforcement of religious decrees. Obligatory sharia for Muslims, enforced by the British state, is the ultimate threat implicit in Archbishop Williams's call for accommodation.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, the Islamists' call for introduction of Islamic religious law in the West is an innovation, not heard in Europe or the United States before the radicalization of Muslims at the end of the 1970s. This is because it is actually a violation of traditional sharia, which commands that Muslims living in non-Muslim lands obey the law and respect the customs of the host countries. This requirement is spelled out, for instance, in the sharia volume A Code of Practice for Muslims in the West (1999), which quotes the moderate Iraqi Shia ayatollah Ali Sistani pronouncing that Muslims living in non-Muslim nations must commit themselves "to abide by the laws of that country," as they implicitly promise to do when they sign an immigration form. If they cannot do this, they should return to Muslim territory.