religious law to rate as equal to existing British law?
Pakistani father murdered his daughter for converting to a Jehovah’s Witness. He would, of course, have been acquitted, under Shariah which the Muslim fundamentalists are trying to bring into England. The aim of every Britisher should be to repeal out-of-date laws such as those dealing with blasphemy and to allow no further repressive laws to be added to the books. Indeed if human brotherhood means anything to us then we, through organizations such as Amnesty International, should help people in Muslim countries who run foul of the Shariah, in particular, the apostasy provisions. The question of censorship is a vexed one. If Salman Rushdie had been advocating the violent overthrow of Islam then a court case would have been in order. As it was, I am sure that he was aiming at the evolutionary liberalization of theocracy by Muslims being able to laugh at the risible instead of taking themselves so seriously. On 24 December 1990, Salman Rushdie met with six Muslim scholars and “embraced I
