Archbishop's sharia comments:"Recipe for disaster"

By Paul Majendie

LONDON (Reuters) - A government minister has accused Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams of concocting "a recipe for chaos" for suggesting the introduction in Britain of some aspects of sharia law was unavoidable.

The main political parties distanced themselves from Thursday's comments on Islamic law by Williams, the spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans.

"You cannot run two systems of law alongside each other. That would be a recipe for chaos," said Culture Secretary Andy Burnham. -----------------Join the debate on sharia------------------ here

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Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: "On this I think he is wrong" while former Home Secretary David Blunkett said that formalising sharia law "would be catastrophic in terms of social cohesion."

The Sun said on Friday: "It's easy to dismiss Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as a silly old goat. In fact he's a dangerous threat to our nation."

The issue of integrating Britain's 1.8 million Muslims has been widely debated since July 2005, when four British Islamists carried out suicide bombings on London's transport system, killing 52 people.

Those attacks prompted questioning of a long-standing policy of avoiding a single British identity and promoting a multicultural society, which some argue has led to segregation of ethnic minorities.