THE RECENT decision of the Quebec National Assembly to unanimously support a resolution opposing the adoption of Islamic laws in the province will likely have mixed response from Canadian Muslims.
In the meantime, Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal government in Ontario remain coy about their pending decision on this matter, even though former NDP attorney general Marion Boyd recommended last December in a report to them that use of sharia law be permitted among Muslims in arbitrating family disputes outside of the provincial family court system.
Those most uneasy about introduction of sharia into the Canadian legal system are Muslim women and their representative organization, Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW). In Quebec, Muslim women found their most resolute leader in Fatima Houda-Pepin, a Liberal MNA from Montreal.
The subject of sharia is vastly complex, and there is no common consensus about its form and application among Muslims within the many branches of Islam.
At a minimum, sharia is understood to be the path of morally right living revealed in the Koran, Islam’s sacred text, and as it found expression in the conduct of prophet Muhammad.
But Islam as a historical reality was not merely a religion understood in terms of private belief. Islam became a state during the prophet’s life and, soon after his demise, it became transformed into an empire.
Muslim religious and legal scholars developed sharia in reponse to the administrative challenges of that great empire during the high tide of Islamic civilization. By the end of the 10th century, their work was brought to an end.
FAITHFUL ADHERENCE
Henceforth, Muslims—particularly Sunni Muslims, who constitute the main branch of Islam and account for four-fifths of the Muslim population globally—would adhere faithfully to sharia as provided for since the 10th century, irrespective of how the world has changed since then.
Sharia as a Koranic concept is embedded in the sacred text. But sharia as a body of law is a human construction within a historical period reflecting knowledge and prejudices of the time.
It is also a product of a patriarchal system within which women, irrespective of Koranic injunctions of equality and fairness between sexes, were not considered equal to men.
For traditionalists and literal-minded Muslims, sharia—the humanly constructed body of law—is deemed sacred. In modern post-colonial Muslim societies, the effort to reform sharia has not been successful. Instead, Islamic revivalism or fundamentalism in recent decades has pushed back ideas of reform with demands for implementing sharia as it has stood for centuries.
Consequently, any deliberation within Canada of permitting use of sharia by Muslims to arbitrate their disputes raises innumerable and difficult questions.
The premise of sharia as sacred is contrary to principles of the Canadian legal system, and would be at odds with the Canadian constitution.
Moreover, there is no uniformity in Muslim understanding about the contents of sharia, its interpretations and applications. The Muslim world itself remains deeply divided about how to implement sharia while struggling to find its path into the modern world of science, democracy and human rights.
WOMEN AT RISK
Most importantly, as CCMW has repeatedly stated, any concession to sharia would be breaking faith with Muslim women and children in Canada who are more secure in their rights under our Charter of Rights than they would be under a legal system guarded by literal-minded Muslim men who remain at odds with the contemporary world.
The argument by proponents of sharia in Ontario that its availability would be voluntary disguises the social reality of Muslim communities within which women and children live.
In banning sharia, Quebec legislators have shown an understanding of Islam as one of the world’s great transcendent faiths—not to be confused with its medieval architecture.
Now it is for Ontario legislators to show if they have similar wisdom—or they prefer pandering to the demagogy of those Muslim men whose like minded co-religionists elsewhere in the Muslim world have so readily abused the rights of women, minorities and dissidents in the name of sharia.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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