Taking Serious Threats Seriously

Patrick Nash writes in his study of British Islam and English Law, “Conventional jurisprudence has proved itself inadequate to the task of conceptualising the relationship between Islam and English law,” Nash, a barrister and legal historian, is ideally qualified to explore the issues British Islam raises for the rule of law and also offer some provocative solutions.

The book demonstrates how woefully British institutions have grappled with the problems that Muslim groups and their transnational clan networks pose for a secular, liberal democratic order. Nash begins by explaining how the prevalence of progressive liberal and multiculturalist theories of justice have perversely misunderstood the nature of British Islam and how this misrecognition has paralysed the legislative responses of successive UK governments.

The influence of American understandings of social justice and individual rights dating from the Harvard philosopher John Rawls’s Theory of Justice (1971) and…