Western Resistance

According to Christina Blizzard, writing in the Toronto Sun, the terms of Islamic law, even in its most moderate interpretations, do not treat women as the equals to men. This has caused embarrassment to Liberal Premier, Dalton McGuinty, who will soon be facing an election.

The dilemma the Liberal government faces as it comes under increasing pressure from feminist groups, moderate Muslims and others to ditch the sharia proposal, is how to quietly do so without appearing to criticize Islam.

. She adds that

In many ways, this echoes another hot topic around Queen's Park in the last election -- public funding for private religious schools. Under former Tory finance minister Jim Flaherty's plan, parents with students in private religious schools would have received a tax break. There would have been no controls on what was taught in those private schools.

Blizzard states that the loudest voices against the law are those of women. Homa Arjomand is the co-ordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court in Canada. Iranian-born, she is now an apostate from Islam.

"I am a humanist now," she said in an interview. "I strongly believe that religion should stay a private matter for individuals and it has no room in any kind of justice system of the state.

"I have experience and I have seen what religious law would do to people, especially sharia. Women are considered second- class citizens. They have no rights at all, even the ones who are born and raised here," she said.

The Arbitration Act and this country's policy of multiculturalism "ensure that minorities stay minorities," by keeping them isolated and out of the mainstream of society, she believes.

"We are leaving the lives of these women to the mercy of mullahs and sharia court or whoever is running these courts."

The Boyd Report was prompted by a retired Muslim lawyer, Syed Mumtaz Ali, according to journalist Bruce Cheadle who adds that Mumtaz Ali's "view of Shariah was unabashedly fundamentalist and political".

He quotes Anver Emon, a US Islamic Law scholar, recently hired by the University of Toronto:

"The volatility of the debate has a lot to do with what people have experienced...in countries like Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, where there is no doubt that Islamic law - particularly these medieval rules of law - are being enforced in various ways and have the effect of discriminating against women," said Anver Emon, an American scholar in Islamic law recently hired by the University of Toronto....

"What's interesting is both of these (warring) groups have the same conception of Shariah: it's these medieval rules," he said.

"Both of them adopt the same definition and both adopt the kind of fundamentalism about the law that you find in the Wahhabi circles: that Islamic law is nothing more than this strict, really rigorous, fundamentalist, literal reading of the Qur'an, the traditions of the prophet and these medieval rules.

"My retort is, certainly the process of Shariah is a very different conception than simply the rules of Shariah."

Syed Mumtaz Ali is described in a report by David Quellette in Judeoscope:

The media has repeatedly reported that the project was born in 2003 when Syed Mumtaz Ali, a lawyer and President of the Canadian Society of Muslims, created the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice. That's only partially true. What the media persistently fails to report, however, is that Mumtaz Ali has been advocating the implementation of binding sharia courts for a much longer time and that his goals reach far beyond the establishment of a mere Islamic arbitration and mediation process.

In 1995, in an interview posted on the Canadian Society of Muslims website, Mumtaz Ali declared: "Do you want to govern yourself by the personal law of your own religion, or do you prefer governance by secular Canadian family law? If you choose the latter, then you cannot claim that you believe in Islam as a religion and a complete code of actualized life by a Prophet who you believe to be a mercy to all".

The Ontario government has effectively avoided dealing with this proposal since it arrived last December, and as they prevaricate on whether or not to bring it into law, the protests have begun, and on an international scale.