I have a meeting with Fatima Houda-Pepin in the provincial riding of La Piniere, which she represents as a Liberal member in the Quebec National Assembly.
The riding is on the south shore of the St. Lawrence across from Montreal and includes the town of Brossard.
Houda-Pepin has been elected in this riding since 1994 and, as support for Quebec separatism once more advances, she is preparing for the next election knowing that federalists have a hard campaign ahead of them.
But I want to talk to her about the changing face of Canadian politics in general, about her role as a Muslim-Arab woman having emigrated from Morocco, and about the resolution recently adopted unanimously by the province to ban sharia (Islamic law).
It turns out to be a wonderful 90 minutes, listening to a highly gifted and intelligent woman completely at home in three languages—Arabic, French and English.
We connect at many different levels given Houda-Pepin’s interests in international politics, on issues of development in Africa and elsewhere, her knowledge and understanding of Islam and Muslim history, and her insights into conditions of gender inequality in the Arab-Muslim world.
I ask her about Fatima Mernissi, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at University of Muhammad V in Rabat, Morocco. Houda-Pepin knows Mernissi and has invited her to Quebec to address gender issues from the perspective of modern Muslim women. Mernissi is one of the most eloquent and outstanding Muslim intellectuals whose writings on Arab culture, women and Islam are incomparably superior to the apologetics and polemics pouring out of the Arab-Muslim world.
I believe no Muslim male can hold a candle to the light that Mernissi has shed on contemporary political culture of the civilization into which she was born. Mernissi confirms the adage that only the oppressed possess the most heartfelt truth about an oppressive culture or political system.
Houda-Pepin says she is “incredulous” that any level of government would entertain the idea of introducing sharia into Canada.
Sharia is a closed system of juridical thinking and legal code based on the premise of it being sacred. Though there are several different and recognized schools of Islamic jurisprudence, all commonly agree on sharia’s sacredness.
It is impermissible, according to traditional Muslim scholarship, to “pick and choose” elements of sharia—as has been proposed in Ontario for use in family arbitration—while disregarding the whole, and then subordinating those elements to judicial interpretation of another legal system as the one in Canada.
Women remain opposed
Many Muslim women in Canada—particularly those who are professionals, independent thinking, unapologetic about their faith, confident about their role within family, and positive about their children’s future—remain opposed to any suggestion that introduction of sharia will be beneficial to them.
They understand that the Canadian constitution protects women and children better, and grants them more rights, than sharia, which reflects values of a retrograde patriarchal culture and was devised almost exclusively by men in their own interest.
The proponents of sharia are, in my view, deceitfully engaged in importing the system piecemeal over time, by manipulating the politics of multiculturalism to their advantage.
As Houda-Pepin said to me, it is a puzzle why anyone, apart from Muslim fundamentalists, would entertain or support the idea of importing sharia into Canada.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, irrespective of recommendations his government has requested from former NDP attorney-general Marion Boyd, should invite Houda-Pepin for consultation before he imposes elements of a retrograde legal system on Muslim women and children in Ontario.
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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