c. 2004 Religion News Service

VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ Some prominent Muslim leaders would like the Canadian province of British Columbia to formally allow Islamic shariah law to be used to arbitrate decisions regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance and other family disputes.

These influential Muslims want to follow the lead of some eastern Canadian Muslims who are making submissions in support of shariah to an Ontario government review committee, which is examining whether Islam’s religious codes conform to Canadian law.

Imam Sahadat Mohammed of Burnaby, just east of Vancouver, says he hopes Ontario Muslims are successful in their efforts to endorse shariah so British Columbia Muslims can follow suit.

“It would be good. It would be very easy. And it would clean up a backlog in the (civil) courts,” Mohammed said.

Although the British Columbia Muslim Association has not yet made an official presentation on shariah to the provincial government, some Muslim leaders say they would like to obtain official government sanction of the arbitrations that Muslim priests are already making for adherents.

Orthodox rabbis in Canada have been making religious rulings for years on Jews’ family, marriage and business conflicts.

The Muslim leaders and an Orthodox British Columbia rabbi say it’s reasonable for Canada’s 650,000 Muslims, who make up the country’s second largest religion after Christianity, to ask for the same rights.

Other Muslims, however, worry it could be dangerous to legally endorse shariah law in Canada _ in part because Muslims from different countries disagree on how to interpret the complex code of conduct and because some Muslims may use shariah to discriminate against Canadian women.

Over the past decade, Mohammed said, he has ruled on many Muslim family disputes, including how property should be divided in divorce and inheritance cases.

Often, he said, the family members take his religion-based decrees to secular lawyers, who then draw up papers to make the religion-based decisions legally binding.

Since some Orthodox Jews in British Columbia take part in a Jewish court system called Beth Din, Vancouver Rabbi Levy Teitlebaum maintained a shariah system of adjudicating private disputes, as long as it followed Canadian law, would be an “appropriate method of community and ethnic involvement _ because (Muslim) leaders are connected to the people and they know their principles.”

British Columbia Muslim Association President Daud Ismail said he personally believes it would be good to have shariah law legally institutionalized under the Arbitration Act.

“We have talked about it at the BCMA. We have looked at the benefits. But we think it needs more thorough study before we make a presentation to the attorney-general,” said Ismail, whose organization represents roughly 40,000 Sunni Muslims in British Columbia, the largest group among the province’s more than 60,000 Muslims.

Even though British Columbia imams are already instituting shariah codes in their mosques, Ismail emphasized shariah should never be used in a way that undermined the Canadian Constitution or the courts.

In Ontario, the Liberal provincial government’s review of shariah law is being conducted by former attorney-general Marion Boyd at the request of Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Although it has yet to be formally approved in Canada, religious arbitration of family disputes has been tolerated, even encouraged, by the courts since the Arbitration Act was passed in 1991.

However, Canadian Muslim organizations are staking out different positions on whether to formalize shariah as an alternative form of civil law.

The influential Canadian Islamic Congress supports it. But many Canadian Muslim women adamantly oppose shariah because they have seen how the sometimes-harsh 1,400-year-old rules have been used in some countries to oppress women.

The Muslim Canadian Federation, another major Muslim organization, also says it isn’t ready for religious law to be used to settle legal matters, saying it could contravene the Canadian Constitution and stigmatize Muslims who oppose potentially unfair decisions.

Aziz Khaki, a Vancouver-based director of the Muslim Canadian Federation, said “the ideals” of shariah are positive, but Canada should be extremely careful about formally implementing the code.

Muslims from different cultures interpret shariah in dramatically different ways, Khaki said, and he would hate to see Muslims who oppose the formalization of shariah in Canada being ostracized as “bad Muslims.”

However, some Muslim leaders say a precedent for officially endorsing shariah in Canada may have been set by the Orthodox Jewish court system _ which allows Canadian Jews to present their disputes to a specially trained rabbi whose decision is binding on the parties _ and enforceable in a court of law.

“We hear anything that is brought to us, whether it is a business deal gone sour or inheritance and domestic disputes between a husband and wife,” said Teitlebaum, executive director of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council, which has spearheaded the Beth Din courts in Canada.

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