IN February of 2008, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, delivered an address on the fraught subject of “Islam in English Law.” The speech, which circled around the question of whether a civil justice system could accommodate Islamic legal codes, was learned, recondite and occasionally impenetrable. The headlines it generated were not: The head of the Church of England, the newspapers blared, had endorsed Shariah law in Britain. Which he had — sort of, kind of, in the most academic and nuanced and trying-not-to-offend-anyone way imaginable.
For Williams, who announced on Friday that he will lay down his mitre at the end of this year, the Shariah controversy was typical of his tenure. Bearded, kindly and theologically subtle, the archbishop has spent the last 10 years trying to bring an academic’s finesse to issues where finesse often just looks like evasion — the spread of Islam in a de-Christianizing Europe, the divides within the Anglican Communion over homosexuality and women’s ordination, the rise of a combative New Atheism.
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