I had the honour of chairing the lecture given by Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury that is published as chapter 2 in this volume. Given in the Royal Courts of Justice and on the topic of civil and religious law in England, it was a profound lecture and one not readily understood on a single listening. It was, I believe, not clearly understood by all, and certainly not by sections of the media which represented the Archbishop as suggesting the possibility that Muslims in this country might be governed by their own system of shariʽa law.

That is certainly not what he was suggesting. On the contrary he made it plain that there could not be some subsidiary shariʽa jurisdiction which, I quote, ‘could have the power to deny access to rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights’. Speaking more specifically of apostasy he said: ‘in a society where freedom of religion is secured by law, it is obviously impossible for any group to claim that conversion to another faith is simply disallowed or to claim the right to inflict punishment on a convert.’