ROWAN
WILLIAMS AND THE 21st CENTURY CANTERBURY TALES
The Archbishop on the
Road to Mecca
Geoffrey Chaucer had a monk, a friar, a nun’s priest, a prioress, a second nun and a canon’s yeoman but he had no archbishop. Why? Were they that unpopular? Did he miss something? The first archbishop of Canterbury was Saint Augustine. One of Gus’ successors was beheaded by an angry mob in 1381. Oh, what tales an archbishop could have told…especially an Archbishop of Canterbury! Perhaps Chaucer found them too boring, too conventional, too God-ridden. Maybe he had a presentiment of the future and didn’t like what he saw. He would not have liked the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
Chaucer lived in the 14th Century. They were closer to God in those days. The Devil was everywhere. Life was short. If it weren’t the Black Death it would be something else. There was pestilence and vermin and codpieces. It was difficult to tell which was the most frightening. There were wars that lasted a hundred years. Perhaps in a moment of clarity Chaucer saw past Bolingbroke and Henry VIII and Churchill—saw Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, the 104th, an Apostate, a betrayer of his religion, his country, of everything Chaucer stood for, a man willing to introduce the Islamic fox into the Christian henhouse, mix a little Sharia Law with Coke.
There weren’t many Musselmen or Mohametans residing in Merry
Olde England when Chaucer hit the road to Canterbury in 13-something. If there
had been and he had not held his tongue he would have been the Salman Rushdie
of the 14th Century. Chaucer had a tendency toward the irreverent.
If the current Archbishop of Canterbury had been traveling with Chaucer The Tales might have had a different ending—not that they had an ending, but the
atmosphere would have been different: gloomy, morose, a searching for skulls in
a graveyard. But there was no Rowan Williams, instead there were nuns and monks
and parsons. Would any of them have suggested applying French Law to parts of
England? Not likely. What did they know about French Law…or English Law…or
Sharia? Little enough. But Rowan Williams knows Sharia Law—or at least pretends
to. “Be at ease,” he would have told his fellow travelers, like the Black
Death, Sharia Law “is unavoidable,” and “Allahu akbar,” it will help maintain
social order.
That is what Hitler
said the Nuremberg Laws would do. It is what Pitchfork Ben Tillman promised
with his Black Codes. Is the Archbishop prescient or what? He told BBC that “certain provisions of Sharia are already recognized in our society
and under our law, so it’s not as if we are bringing in an alien…system.” That
is what Herr Ribbentrop told Neville Chamberlain! Lord Haw Haw agreed. There
wasn’t any significant difference between Nazi Germany and Tudor England,
between Nazi Germany and the Danegeld—a few more beheadings perhaps.
“I think we need to
look at this with a clearer eye and not imagine either we know exactly what we
mean by Sharia and not just associate it with what we read about Saudi Arabia
or whatever,” said Williams. Yes, a clearer eye, but the ‘whatever’ is
puzzling.
The Muttawa, the
Saudi religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice, arrested a woman in a Starbucks last week for sitting in a
section reserved for families. She was with a male colleague. They were not
members of the same family and they had no chaperon. That is not allowed. She
was taken to Riyadh prison, strip-searched and forced to sign a confession.
What else could she do? They have ways to make people confess. It must have
been what the Archbishop meant by ‘whatever.’
In anticipation of
Valentine’s Day, the Muttawa has banned red roses, supposedly a symbol of love.
A few years ago it was the Barbie doll. It isn’t easy promoting virtue or
preventing vice. There is no telling what naughty ideas a Barbie doll could put
in the heads of foolish young girls. Whatever.
In Iran, sisters
Zohreh and Azar Kabiri-niat were sentenced to a flogging for having illicit
relations with men. It appears to have been double jeopardy for they were no
sooner flogged than they were charged with committing adultery while being
married. They were found guilty and sentenced to death by stoning. Their
partners, their cohorts, will suffer shame and humiliation…whatever.
In Australia, Rabiah
Hutchinson, a one-time hippie who converted to Islam in 1973 continues to make
noise. In her most recent pronouncement she said the victims of the Bali
bombings got what they deserved because they were pot-smoking, cocaine-snorting
pedophiles. A close friend of Rabiah, also a convert to Islam, supports Osama
bin Laden because he is following the “correct version of Islam.” Maybe that is
what confuses the Archbishop—too many versions. He needs to look at this with a
clearer eye—or maybe he can open his eyes from time to time. Twenty-twenty
vision is better than hindsight.
Many people have
converted to Christianity, including some Muslims, and none of them, as far as
is known, has said Eric
Rudolph's version of Christianity was the correct one.
It is no better in
Iraq. According to a recent CNN report, 133 women were killed last year in
Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, for violating “Islamic teachings.” Some were
killed for not wearing a headscarf, some for wearing makeup. Abductions, rapes
and ‘honor killings’ are on the rise in Basra. This is the giant, economy size
‘whatever.’ But Williams prefers to look at the ‘big’ picture, not at the
thousands of ‘little’ pictures playing out every day across Islam.
“Nobody in their
right mind,” he says, “would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity
that’s been sometimes associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic
states, the extreme punishments, the attitude to woman as well,” but where
“there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything
else that commands your loyalty or allegiance (Like being a member of the Nazi
Party?) is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts—I think that’s
a bit of a danger.”
Is it any wonder
that Jefferson didn’t trust the Church of England?
Chaucer never met
Rowan Williams but he certainly met someone who could have served as his proxy.
Remember the canon and his yeoman? The canon didn’t do much talking but the
yeoman did. He said his master was an alchemist, a scientist: he could turn
base metals into silver and gold. Williams, too, is an alchemist—he is trying
to transform a base metal, Islam, into the silver and gold of Christianity.
This makes him a worse fool than the canon—given the state of metallurgy in the
14th Century and the state of Religion in the 21st. The
yeoman said his master could pave the road upon which they were traveling with
silver and gold. When it comes to paving stones, the only thing Williams has is
the Qur’an and taqiyya and the road is to dhimmitude.