When I first heard the comments of the Archbishop of Canterbury on Radio 4’s Today Programme, I was pleasantly surprised. Here was someone who’d studied what the Sharia means to Muslims, and had taken the misleading popular media images of it out of the equation. As someone who has been studying Islamic Law for several years as part of my degree, my reaction to the recent storm generated in the media, and in particular the tabloids, over Dr Rowan William’s comments about Sharia has been much like the Archbishop’s himself — one of shock.When he first spoke of the introduction of civil courts that would deal with marital disputes, and perhaps financial transactions, I thought it was about time that these interactions finally gained some state recognition, having been taking place among Muslims in British society for many years, so that, for instance, a couple who have gotten married under the auspices of an Islamic court do not have to register separately at a registry office for their union to be recognised by the state.The extraordinarily negative public response made me realise that this would not be easy to achieve. The main problem for Muslims who would like to see the introduction of such bodies is one of the public perception of the Sharia, or Islamic Law. Originally referring to a ‘path to water’, the term Sharia evokes very negative images of degrading public floggings and the like in the popular consciousness.
Undoubtedly these aspects did make up the penal code in classical formulations of the Sharia, but to focus on them exclusively, as is popular even in the more responsible media outlets, is to misrepresent. For instance, in one classical textbook on Islamic Law, out of a thousand pages, only forty are devoted to the penal code. In any case, neither the Archbishop, nor any of the leading Muslim intellectuals supporting him, like Oxford Theologian Tariq Ramadan, are for a moment advocating the patently absurd suggestion that those aspects of the Sharia be introduced into British society.In all of this, it is worth stepping back for a moment, and asking: ‘what exactly does Sharia mean to Muslims?’ As Tariq Ramadan stated on Newsnight last week — and he is certainly representative of the attitudes of large swathes of Muslims living in the West — among the aims and principles of the Sharia is achieving justice, and with the current legal system fulfilling that, Muslims can be content to live under a system that conforms with the norms of the Sharia. The same is taught by Oxford’s other Islamic Theologian, Yahya Michot.Other aspects of Sharia include a Muslim’s personal relationship with God, and so entails things like praying five times a day, not eating pork, and avoiding alcohol: things that are perfectly possible to be fulfilled by Muslims in this country. As for the penal code, as UCLA Law Professor, and expert on Islamic Law, Khaled Abou El Fadl points out in a very brief article of his, the penal code is frequently designed, as in the case for severe traditional punishments for sexual misdemeanours, to make a moral point rather than for implementation, and as such, it is almost impossible to carry out, given the burden of proof required. According to Akram Nadwi, of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, yet another local intellectual colossus on the subject, we do not have any records in history (until modern times) of anyone being punished for adultery due to the virtual impossibility of fulfilling the demands of proof required of the Sharia. A clip of the sort of help British Sharia courts are providing women in more conservative Muslim communities in the North can be found on www.bbcnews.com, in the article, ‘The view from inside a Sharia court.’Usaama al-Azami is the President of the Islamic Society.

A second year Worcester student was hospitalised on Saturday after injuring herself on a spike while scaling railings by Magdalen.he accident took place last Saturday during the traditional ‘midway’ celebrations at Worcester. After being denied entry to Magdalen by its porters, the student and her friends decided to seek an alternative route into the college, and she was being helped over railings on Longwall Street when she slipped and slashed her thigh on a large spike. She was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital by ambulance and given stitches.Sam Pritchard, a Magdalen student, witnessed the aftermath of the accident. He said, “There were all these people in costumes making a lot of noise. There’s a slightly lower fence or gate entrance to Magdalen with spikes on it that they were flooding over.“Inside Magdalen, under an archway at the entrance to my stairway there was a girl slouched, screaming, with blood on her skirt.”The Worcester midway celebrations take the form of an afternoon pub crawl in fancy dress with intermittent attempts to enter other colleges, and a formal dinner in the evening. Students dressed up in groups according to where they live in College, and costumes included characters from The Wizard of Oz, sheep, Power Rangers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.Worcester JCR President, Maanus Jain, said, “We go around Oxford drinking in pubs in fancy dress. Occasionally we do go into other colleges but the porters are normally very good-natured. We’d been to New and the porters had asked us to leave. We never meant to cause a disturbance.“When we got to Magdalen the porters weren’t very keen on letting us in. Some people did run at them and a small group of people did try to get in another way. That’s when a girl got injured on a spike and an ambulance was called. After that we carried on.”Jain emphasised, “This was an isolated incident in what was a pretty good-humoured day.” Worcester is threatening fines for anyone who is identified as having been part of the scaling incident. Magdalen College has refused to comment.OUSU Welfare Officer, Louise Randall, said, “Most people will find that their judgement becomes worse when they are drunk …Drink in moderation and make sure accidents don’t ruin your night or put your safety at risk.”

I found myself at the centre of a minor media maelstrom the week before last when a colleague and I published the findings of a small research study on the teaching of patriotism in schools. We argued in the report that teachers should not promote patriotism in the classroom, but should present the desirability of loving one’s country as an open question or controversial issue. Despite the deep offence this suggestion appears to have caused in some quarters of the Fourth Estate, I still think it’s right.I take patriotism to be love of one’s country, and thus a species of emotion or sentiment. Being a patriot does not entail any normative beliefs about how one’s country should be governed or what duties one might have to it. In this respect patriotism differs from nationalism, which is the belief that one’s nation should be, or should remain, an independent sovereign state. To promote patriotism, then, is to induce and nurture a particular emotional attachment. The attempt to shape students’ emotions in the classroom is not objectionable per se, but it does oblige us to draw a distinction between rational and non-rational ways of bringing such influence to bear. To influence a person’s emotions rationally is to offer her good reasons for moderating or redirecting her emotional responses, to help her see why the reasons are good. To influence her emotions non-rationally is to deploy methods of psychological manipulation to alter her emotional responses directly, without reference to her capacities for rational choice. Only the first of these is properly described as educational and justifiably brought to bear in schools.If this is right, our question can be reframed as follows: are there good reasons, that we can and should offer to students, for loving one’s country? This immediately raises the broader question of how we should delimit the class of appropriate or fitting objects of love.It seems fair to say that this class will be very wide: human beings are powerfully drawn to all sorts of things, and in most cases we regard the presence of powerful attraction as reason enough to love. But there are limits, and one of these is set by the idea that loving certain things is bad for us, in the sense of being directly or indirectly damaging to our mental or physical health. Loving what is morally vicious or corrupt is liable to be detrimental to one’s character and self-respect. There is no doubt that it is logically and psychologically possible for us to love things of which (or people of whom) we morally disapprove; but there is a reasonable doubt that we can do this without harm to ourselves. To love what is corrupt is itself corrupting, not least because it inclines us to ignore, forget, forgive or excuse the corruption.And there’s the rub for patriotism. Countries are morally ambiguous entities: they are what they are by virtue of their histories, and it is hard to think of a national history free from the blights of war-mongering, tyranny, slavery and subjugation, or a national identity forged without recourse to exclusionary and xenophobic stereotypes. It is therefore not implausible to regard countries as precisely the sort of objects whose moral failings make them inappropriate objects of love. I do not mean to suggest that assessing the moral rectitude of nations is a straightforward business. On the contrary, the question of how to weigh up the various kinds of vice and virtue exhibited by countries is clearly a vexed one. And just how corrupt does something need to be before it becomes inappropriate to love it? These questions are matters of reasonable disagreement among reasonable people. And this implies that the desirability of patriotic sentiment is properly construed, and therefore properly taught, as a controversial issue.Dr Michael Hand is from the Institue of Education, University of London.

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is brimming with sexual violence: the dominance of men over women. The play charts the story of Giovanni’s incestuous lust-fuelled seduction of his sister Annabella and her subsequent marriage. Using techniques such as televised porn, director Sam Pritchard has tried to move the Jacobean play into the modern day, and updated it to reflect our society’s ongoing obsession with sex and scandal.Set in an upper- middle class household, the play aims to confront society’s view of women as sex objects. On stage, in the action, it succeeds. Matt Orton’s Giovanni is electrifying. His passion, rage and sexual energy is revealed as much by the intensity of his silences as by the intense violence in grasping his sister’s face in his hands and growling the declaration of his perverse love. Annabella, played by Charlotte Bayley, is the perfect portrait of a woman whose dignity, as well as her body, has been defiled by her brother’s sexual aggression. She seems to give herself willingly to him, but her tremor of fear as Giovanni touches her reveals her terror, a terror as much at her own submission as at her brother’s assault. The directing is at its best here too; Pritchard lets us dwell on Annabella, alone in her bed, her face buried in her hands, her body racked by sobs. The aftermath is revealed to be as important as the act.With this sensitivity revealed in the acting itself, the flashes of pornography that bridge the scenes are strikingly gratuitous. It is almost as if the director fears that we won’t understand the play’s point. Yet making it explicit in the grainy shots of sex acts detracts and distracts. Also bizarre was the decision to make the sinister Friar into a religious talk- show host. It detracted from the power of the play, and skewed the focus of criticism. Is the play attacking the moral hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, or of chatshow hosts? Either is a fair target, but by conflating the two, the concentration is lost, and the intensity blurred.The acting remains top-notch though. Will Cudmore puts in a fantastic, sinuous, dangerous performance as Vasques, and Charlotte Norris’ Putana reveals that woman’s complicity in sexual violence is just as demeaning as man’s sexual aggression. ‘Tis pity that the production sometimes submits to the desire to shock the audience – not just that she’s a whore.By Timothy Sherwin

William Hedley, 18, is one of the first ever boys to hold an offer for St Hilda’s. The Shrewsbury School pupil spent last Saturday afternoon exploring his new turf at an open day organised for those with conditional offers for Michaelmas 2008. Will has heard mixed reports of what the Hilda’s girls have in store for him and admits that he’s not quite sure what to expect come October. Will’s friends are clearly optimistic about the prospect of him going to a former all-girls’ college. “I made a bet with one of my school friends. If I don’t sleep with 20 girls by the end of first year I have to take him on holiday,” says Will.St Hilda’s has repeatedly refused to give out any figures regarding how many boys they’re expecting to take at the start of the academic year, and estimates vary wildly. However, according to Will, about 20 of the 50 who attended the open day were boys.Having initially applied to Wadham to read German, Will got pooled to St Hilda’s during the application process. His memories of the interview period are somewhat jaded:“It was horrible weather and I went out the night before because I’d thought my interviews were over.”“I was annoyed only because I wanted to go home and thought I wouldn’t have to go through any more interviews and questioning – but St Hilda’s itself wasn’t a problem and the interview there went really well. At the Open Day, I talked to lots of other boys who had been pooled there and some of them said they had been disappointed at where they had been sent.“Even a girl said that when she was applying somewhere else, she had thought of Hilda’s as a ‘drop-out’ college and hoped she wouldn’t end up there. Unlucky for her, then, I guess.”Will has said that the Open Day on Saturday was well organised, but that it was clear the College was still adjusting to change.“In some areas, it was a bit obvious that it had been a girl’s college for decades,” he says, “especially with sport. They took a lot of pride in showing us the netball and tennis facilities, but there’s nothing there for boys yet.“They didn’t say much about the fact that taking boys is a big change for the college except to say that accommodation will be mixed when we arrive.”Luise Birgelen, JCR Sport’s Rep at St Hilda’s said that students are doing what they can to make provisions for the male cohort when they arrive in Michaelmas. “We are doing our best to accommodate new male members of the college,” she said. “Because there will be so few initially, however, we’re anticipating having to set up corporations with other colleges.“Also, St Hilda’s has been successful in securing sponsorship for women’s sports this year and we’re hoping to have a similar situation in 08/09 where financial support will help the college adapt to an increasing number of male members. However, as the process of introducing boys at St Hilda’s will obviously be staggered over a number of years, changes to college facilities will also have to be a gradual process,” she said.JCR President Sam Gisborne has said that St Hilda’s JCR is proposing to alter its constitution to allow a male welfare officer and a male sports officer to be elected, among other new roles which will help to inaugurate the new arrivals at the college.She also said that St Hilda’s had spent considerable time in discussing provisions for a single-sex block of accommodation for female students who felt it was their right to request it, having joined the college unaware that men would be accepted as students during their course.“This issue was discussed at length in Michaelmas 2006 and the idea of a single sex block was rejected on the grounds that it would be a logistical nightmare and that there wouldn’t be enough volunteers to fill the rooms. Instead the JCR agreed that there should be single sex corridors throughout the first year accommodation in the initial intake in 2008.”

In May last year, Cherwell broke the news that our student union had copied a crucial document from the student union of another university. The OUSU Rent Document, which is supposed to provide helpful advice for Oxford’s JCRs in negotiating rent increases with colleges, was found to be 80 percent identical to the Cambridge’s Student Union (CUSU) version.It was striking not just because it had been copied in the first place, but because it had been done with such utter incompetence; several references to ‘Cambridge’ and ‘CUSU’ remained in the text when even a basic ‘find and replace’ would have removed them.At the time, then OUSU President Alan Strickland explained it away as an administrative error: the wrong version of the file had been uploaded onto the website. This was at least plausible, however unlikely it seemed. OUSU promised to rectify their mistaken immediately and all was forgiven and forgotten.Nine months later, the same rent document is finding its way into the pigeon-holes of JCR Presidents and Treasurers. It has been amended somewhat cynically to remove the explicit references to Cambridge, but even with this blatant detail excepted, the document is still 78 percent identical.
As OUSU Rent Officer Dom Weinberg tells us encouragingly, “I also changed the order of the guide and made an overview page.” It’s nice to know that our elected officials put so much effort into these matters. It is difficult to decide what is most shocking about this. There is the fact the rent officer deigned to remove the named references to Cambridge, yet did not feel it necessary to alter the document any further. Then there is the absurdly unapologetic reaction to the revelation that, despite much flapping and red-faced apologising after the original expose, the bloody thing still hasn’t been changed.Despite the stereotypes, Oxford is not 78% identical to Cambridge. It is an absurd failure of our student union to not only hand out advice originally written for another university, but to neglect to rectify it when prompted. Fix it.

Proposals for a new indoor tennis court on Iffley Road have come up against fierce opposition from locals, including Professor of Theology, Andrew Linzey.Professor Linzey said, “We are not opposed to development on the sports ground per se, what we are opposed to is huge, ugly buildings in a conservation area.“Surely the University can do better than an ‘up-turned sink’ design. It is in the University’s own interest to come to an understanding with local residents.”The plans show a centre just over 25 feet high to be located on the University sports ground which, from some positions, would obscure views towards the city centre. The large, six court indoor tennis building would be built just next to the rugby pitch and very close to a nearby main road. Designs include plans to dig out the area adjacent to the road so the building can stand lower, but the roof still would still stretch a few metres above the fence. The current wooden fence bordering the site would be replaced by tall iron railings.A spokesperson for the University said, “The planning application was registered by the City Council on 15 January and provided residents with the full statutory consultation period to consider and respond to proposals.”She added, “Comments that were made have been taken into account in the final proposals where possible.” However,  members of the Iffley Area Residents Association have said that they feel this response is simply not good enough.Professor Linzey has teamed up with the Association in a stand against the plans. David Barton, Chair of the Association said, “The view from the road beside it will be of a very large, ugly grey zinc roof, divided by lighting panels, stretching back across the field for 33 metres. In our view, the designers haven’t considered the impact of implementing these plans at this particular location, given that it is situated within a conservation area, and close to the Grade 1 Listed building of St John’s Church.”In their submission as a Residents Association, Professor Linzey and co-members will suggest that the building is poorly designed and highly unsuited to the location. They will do so along with those who live opposite the site on Marston Street.Nearby resident Sarah Wild said, “The University obviously cannot have both indoors and the outdoors in the same place because of the restriction at the Iffley Road site; so the answer would be to have a split site – one with primarily indoor and one with primarily outdoor facilities.”The objections of the Resident’s Association will be heard formally at a consultation to be hosted by Oxford City Council. A spokesperson for the Council commented on planning procedures. “As part of the normal planning process we have consulted residents and their comments will be taken into consideration when the application is reviewed,” he said.Oxford University held a public exhibition of the plans at the University Rugby Club pavilion this week where Professor Linzey and the rest of the Association were invited as guests. However, the next discussions concerning the application are not to take place until March.

Oxford is to award scholarships to Middle Eastern journalists.The Mona Megalli Fellowship, part of the Reuters Foundation Fellowship Program, is open to mid-career journalists from the Middle East.The program commemorates Mona Megalli, a prominent Egyptian-American Reuters journalist who died in 2007 after a long illness. Applicants are asked to submit details of their research topics, and should have five years' professional journalistic experience, minimum. The last day to apply is March 30.by Andreas Televantos