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The Archbishop of Canterbury was facing demands to quit last night as the row over sharia law intensified.
Leading bishops publicly contradicted Dr Rowan Williams's call for Islamic law to be brought into the British legal system.
With the Church of England plunged into crisis, senior figures were said to be discussing the archbishop's future.
One member of the church's "Cabinet", the Archbishop's Council, was reported as saying: "There have been a lot of calls for him to resign. I don't suppose he will take any notice, but, yes, he should resign."
Officials at Lambeth Palace told the BBC Dr Williams was in a "state of shock" and "completely overwhelmed" by the scale of the row.
It was said that he could not believe the fury of the reaction. The most damaging attack came from the Pakistan-born Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali.
He said it would be "simply impossible" to bring sharia law into British law "without fundamentally affecting its integrity".
Sharia "would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence.
"This is not to mention the relation of freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy."
This is an example of Sharia law
Mukhtaran Bibi, a young Pakistani woman.
She was accused of having a brother - 14 years of age - who was supposedly seen in public with a girl from another tribal family;
this rumor was never confirmed and Bibi denied it.
She was judged by a Tribal Elders Council of six men to be punished for her brother's sin.
She was sentenced to be gang-raped. The sentence was carried out by five men, her neighbors. Hundreds waited outside as she was gang-raped.
She was then sent home naked in the streets. Amazingly and with great courage Mukhtaran Bibi went to the courts seeking justice.
The men were originally convicted of the rape. Recently a court overturned the conviction as illegal. The requirement for conviction of rape in Pakistan's family law is that four men (all Muslims) have to testify they witnessed the event.
The rapist witnesses were unlikely to testify against themselves.
The law, which is regarded as sacred, is based on the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet.
What is particularly outrageous in the law is that a woman who reports she has been raped will be charged for slanderous accusation and flogged 80 lashes if she is unable to prove the rape.
Under the law you have to produce four pious male Muslim eyewitnesses in order to prove illicit sex has taken place and it's impossible."
Perversely, if there were four witnesses to a rape, they would have been accessories to the crime.
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