The Temple Church is to be commended for its efforts to improve interfaith relations over the past 18 months, even though some of the public meetings it held on Islam in English law did not turn out quite as intended.

Since Muslims were well represented among those who attended the discussions, it was presumably thought tactful to seat the audience facing away from the altar. It’s a sensitive issue: what is now the chapel of the Inner Temple and Middle Temple was built in the 12th century for the Knights Templar, crusaders who fought to regain Jerusalem from Muslim control.

The discussion series was launched in February last year with an ambitious lecture by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the meaning of which is still being debated.

Dr Rowan Williams was followed some three months later by a discussion on whether ‘moral or religious obligation’ could ever justify ‘the use of force inadmissible under secular law’.

Abdullahi An-Na’im, professor of law at Emory University, answered immediately with a resounding and unqualified ‘no’.

He acknowledged that his opposition to an unjust law might require ‘peaceful, non-violent dissent’ – for which he would accept the consequences. ‘But absolutely "no" to violence, regardless of whether the state permits it.’

In October, Edward Fitzgerald QC debated human rights in an age of terrorism with Ruth Wedgwood, professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University.

Fitzgerald began with a principled attack on those who argued that the rules of the game had changed after 11 September 2001 and indefinite detention of enemy combatants was justified by the ‘war on terror’. On the contrary, he said, we should uphold the rights that terrorists seek to destroy because respect for human rights was an essential weapon in the fight against terrorism.

In response, Wedgwood asked what society should do when faced with intelligence that a person was about to cause catastrophic harm.

‘The common-law answer is: just let them go free and absorb the damage. And the ethical question now for every human being is whether the possible scale of the harm changes that calculus.’

In November, speakers were asked whether English law should give more recognition to Islamic law. Ian Edge, co-director of the SOAS centre of Islamic law at London University, knew of many Muslim women who had discovered, on separation from their ‘husbands’, that they and their children ‘had only the barest protection’ because their Islamic marriages had not been registered under English law. That requirement needed to be better known.

More generally, Edge saw no reason for introducing sharia law to England and several reasons for not doing so. English law now recognises monogamous Islamic marriages abroad – even if they were conducted under a law that permits polygamy – so Muslims who come to Britain are no longer at a disadvantage. Foreign divorces were also recognised, he explained, and testators had almost complete freedom to dispose of their property in accordance with Islamic principles.

But Sheikh Faiz Siddiqi, founder of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, said that ‘in a jurisdiction where rights are afforded to many mistresses and there is recognition of same-sex marriages, the idea of polygamy should not be so alien or distant’.

Sheikh Siddiqi said it was wrong to conclude that English law had no connections with Islamic law. ‘Clearly, many laws and decisions have been made in English law through the inspiration of Islamic law.’

Though billed as a dialogue on whether the UK should adopt a pluralistic legal system, this month’s discussion turned out to be two unconnected lectures followed by responses to comments from the audience. Neither Professor Shaheen Sardar-Ali of Warwick University nor Marion Boyd, former attorney general of Ontario, really answered the question they had been asked, with Boyd devoting most of her time explaining why Ontario had made faith-based arbitration non-binding.

Fortunately, the issue was addressed in an excellent – though unsigned – paper distributed by the Temple Church. This noted that the UK already has four different legal systems, the law of Wales now being sufficiently different from English law. But none of these legal systems is itself pluralistic, except to the extent that parties may be bound by ecclesiastical or military law.

For many years, domestic law has accommodated the needs of religious minorities by exempting them from wider legal requirements. For example, Jews may marry ‘any time, any place, anywhere’; a Sikh wearing a turban may ride a motor-cycle without a crash helmet. But this, said the paper, does not make the state itself pluralistic.

The government’s position was summed up by justice minister Bridget Prentice in a Westminster Hall debate. Sharia law, she acknowledged, ‘is the code of personal religious law governing the conduct of Muslims’. This suggested a ‘strong legal pluralist viewpoint’ to the anonymous Temple Church author.

But the minister said that ‘sharia law is not part of the law of England and Wales and nor do the government have any intention of changing that position. We believe that social cohesion is best served by people living together under one legal system, rather than a system of personal laws’. Is this a contradiction? Or merely an insistence that, for example, Muslim women should not be at a disadvantage?

‘Nothing in the law in England and Wales prevents people from abiding by sharia principles if they wish to do so,’ Prentice said, ‘provided that it does not conflict with the law in England and Wales. If it did, the law in England and Wales would prevail.’

What a pity the Archbishop of Canterbury did not put it so clearly.