Professor Anver Emon, who recently completed his Ph.D in history at the University of California at Berkeley, has already arrived in Toronto, though he is not slated to teach his course introducing U of T law students to sharia law until the spring.
“One of the big issues that sharia and Canadian law share is anxiety of judicial interpretation or activism; one interpreting the Constitution and one the Qur’an and Islamic scholarship,” he explained.
Professors Emon, 34, and Mohammad Fadel, 38, both US citizens with advanced law training and an interest in a variety of Islamic legal fields, were hired by U of T to teach courses on sharia in a bid to embrace a more global focus.
But after Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Sunday announcement outlawing the practice of sharia, the rationale for their courses seems undermined, to say the least.
When the Faculty of Law appointed two experts in sharia–Islamic law–last summer, it met with a storm of controversy.
For months, the provincial Liberals had taken international criticism for considering allowing Muslims to set up tribunals to mediate civil matters with sharia law under the umbrella of Ontario’s 1991 Arbitration Act.
Many argued that sharia will trample women’s rights in divorces and other family disputes. U of T’s acting Dean of Law Lorne Sossin, for his part, was inundated with calls from newspapers and other media. The Faculty found itself being accused of easing the transition of Ontario into a tiered law system that would hurt women and blur the distinction between mosque and state.
Meanwhile, the two new courses slated to be taught explaining sharia were both filled with students “beating down the doors,” according to Sossin.
Premier Dalton McGuinty ended debate on Sunday with his surprise decision that religious forms of arbitration, including sharia and rabbinical courts, will be barred.
“The notion of binding religious arbitration is inconsistent with one law for all Ontarians,” he said on Tuesday.
With that, U of T’s two sharia courses got the same status as a course on Latin or Middle French.
Prof. Emon, who wrote an article for the National Post this summer, has been participating in the Ontario debate over sharia. He argued that the debate needs to be more nuanced and creative and it must attempt to acknowledge the significant different types of sharia that have evolved.
In addition to teaching a course on Western tort law, Prof. Emon is to teach an introductory course on sharia. A seminar on sharia and gender is planned for the fall of 2006.
Prof. Fadel, a partner at New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP since 2000, is slated to come next year. Focusing mainly on commercial and securities law, he has taught at the University of Notre-Dame and the University of Virginia and done research into Islamic history. He is slated to teach a course on business organizations and commerce law when he comes to Toronto.
“The point with sharia is to be creative, to have vision and to understand that the historical conditions in which many of these rules were formed do not apply here,” Mr. Emon continued. “Part of the problem with the debate is that the critics see sharia in its worst possible form; wahabi fundamentalism.” The wahabi sect of Islam, mostly
practiced in Saudi Arabia, is famously conservative and traditional.
If sharia were to be used, there would be personnel problems, Mr. Emon acknowledges. “Many of the imams that are currently here applying sharia are not top-notch; they’re B or C students, there would be a need for better standards.”
If standards improve among Toronto’s sharia practitioners, it will be for underground practices of sharia alone.
