More than 100 people came to a lecture hall in the Lash Miller building last Thursday to hear the case for Shariah-based arbitration in Canadian courts. The lecture was organized by the Outreach Committee of the Muslim Students’ Association and aimed to answer questions about Shariah law-muslim law, based on the Koran-and the role of faith-based arbitration in Canada’s secular society.
The issue of Shariah law in Canada has sparked a media sensation across the country, but has also polarized the 700,000-strong Muslim community.
The controversy stems from the horrific human rights records of some of the world’s Islamic courts and regimes. Attracting the most attention is the brutal treatment of women under such systems.
But supporters of Islamic arbitration say that those regimes misuse Shariah for political reasons and violate a basic tenet of Islamic law: social justice. Thursday’s talk, therefore, was meant to assuage some of the serious concerns that remain among the still-skeptical public.
Shariah supporters believe that Canada’s system of laws would perfectly complement a proper implementation of Islamic law.
“We live in Canada,” said Shahina Siddiqui, a social worker from Winnipeg who spoke first. “We have social justice, which is a pre-requisite for Shariah to work.”
Siddiqui’s speech was focused on discussing and countering the most contentious issues in Shariah such as inheritance, child custody, capital punishment, and women’s rights. With 20 years of experience as a social worker and her involvement in Islamic-based mediation, she feels that Shariah law is in fact “reasonable, flexible, [and] time- and content-sensitive”.
The second speaker, Faisal Kutty, a prominent lawyer in Toronto, talked about the history of arbitration in Ontario.
Currently, Ontario law allows for arbitration through the Ontario Arbitration Act of 1991. Based on the Arbitration Act, Jewish, Catholic and Aboriginal citizens have already implemented and used faith-based arbitration courts-legally binding agreements hammered out by both parties in partnership with religious authorities-in which civil disputes over business, property, and divorce are dealt with. The success of these faith-based arbitration courts was the reason why individuals in the Muslim community introduced the idea of Islamic-based arbitration.
Furthermore, Kutty said that allowing members of religious minority groups the option of resolving civil disputes according to their own religious doctrine would be consistent with Canadian law. If the arbitration was respectful of, and worked with, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he said, then such courts would be consistent with the charter’s own guarantee of freedom of religion.
He told the audience that currently, many Canadian Muslims are already using mediation to resolve their disputes through local community leaders. But this current method of dispute resolution is unregulated, not standardized, and not transparent enough. Often, he said, decisions have been made which are not truly Islamic and are laden with what he called “cultural baggage.” Therefore, he said, a system which is recognized by the Canadian courts would ensure that checks and balances are in place, and would prevent abuse of Canadian law, both secular and Islamic.
Both speakers admitted that there is a lot of work to be done to properly implement Islamic arbitration. The Arbitration act, for instance, was originally implemented mainly for commercial businesses dealings; the use of arbitration for family-law disputes is a relatively new idea.
Therefore, Marion Boyd, the former attorney general of Ontario, was recently appointed to review the use of private arbitration to resolve family issues under the Arbitration Act. Her review will aim to deal with the gaps that exist in family dispute arbitration currently-such as the absence of safeguards to ensure all parties are acting voluntarily, especially the vulnerable.
Kutty interjected, however, that such gaps could be remedied through appropriate legislative amendments. Kutty was hopeful that the implementation of Islamic arbitration in Canada would be advancement for Islamic law as a whole: “This will allow for the development of a Canadianized Islam.”
