London - The head of the Anglican Church is "horrified" at the heavy criticism he has received for his controversial call to accommodate sharia, or Islamic law, in Britain, reports said Sunday. Archbishop Rowan Williams also said he would not resign over the issue.
His predecessor, George Carey, has also criticized Williams, accusing him of overstating the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes.
"His acceptance of some Muslim laws within British law would be disastrous for the nation," Carey wrote in The News of The World paper, saying, "There can be no exceptions to the laws of our land which have been so painfully honed by the struggle for democracy and human rights."
However, Williams should not be forced to quit over his remarks, Carey said. "He has my full support ... I understand he is horrified by what has happened."
Carey said his successor might have done the country "a great favour by airing this whole area of controversy," as the public debate might ensure "that the country's existing sharia councils operate under British law."
Williams said nothing Saturday about the row and calls for him to resign. But a statement on his website on Friday said he had made no proposals for sharia, and "certainly did not call for its introduction as some kind of parallel jurisdiction to the civil law."
He is thought likely to comment on the issue on Monday during his address to the General Synod in London, which has powers to hold emergency debates over matters of concern within the church.
Leaving a Saturday service in Cambridge in his first public appearance since the row erupted Thursday, Williams made no comment as he was greeted with a mixture of applause, boos and flashing cameras.
Williams, meanwhile, has been defended by some church figures, including the bishop of Hulme, Stephen Lowe, who said he was appalled at the "knee-jerk" reaction to a serious piece of academic work.
The head of Catholics in England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, told BBC radio on Sunday Williams had raised important issues concerning the rights of religious groups within a secular state.
However, sharia was different from Christian laws and impinged more on politics, Murphy-O'Connor said.
"I think sharia law is a different one, not only a different code but also impinges more in the realm of politics, and therefore I think what the Archbishop of Canterbury says has to be very carefully read," he said.
Senior politicians meanwhile defended the use of religious courts to arbitrate in disputes such as marital issues but said they could never challenge the civil law.
The Labour Party's Geoff Hoon told Sky News' Sunday Live, "The government has been at pains to encourage arbitration, mediation and other ways of resolving matters without the recourse sometimes to expensive legal proceedings."
"But there cannot be any kind of debate about the single authority of our civil legal system and any confusion about that can only cause problems," he said.
Former Conservative Party chancellor Ken Clarke said Williams was "one of the most unworldly men I have ever met."
"This is a secular country and we have one law which applies to every citizen all the way down from the monarch to the merest sort of tramp ... It is applied quite impartially to everybody regardless of their own personal religious beliefs," he said.
"People can, of their own volition, decide to go off and have arbitration ..., particularly in things like divorce and matrimonial affairs by going to a religious court. But that's always with an override to the civil courts," he said.
"We cannot have a parallel system of law."
