Soon we’ll all be in a burqa

What makes Ali’s views pertinent is his apparent success in getting the government of Ontario to sanction sharia officially. His vehicle was a seemingly indifferent piece of legislation, the Arbitration Act, passed in 1991 by the left-wing NDP government.

The act was very much a mirror of our times — soft packaging with nasty bits of shrapnel inside. Its purpose was to resolve disputes outside the court system as part of Canada’s alternative dispute resolution. These procedures sound gentle but they also have the virtue of being cheap and fast, since normal legal processes and protections can be skipped. Their deliberations are confidential. Opt into the act for solving a problem and you can’t opt out. Decisions are binding and enforced by the Canadian courts.

The act was never contemplated for family law but word was about that the Jewish rabbinical courts in Toronto (the Beth Din) were using it as a framework for domestic disputes brought before them. Ali took note and in November 2003 the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice was organised with judicial tribunals to arbitrate what he often calls “Muslim personal law”, a comfy phrase distanced from the negative connotations of sharia. In May he announced that the Ontario government had agreed to incorporate sharia in the arbitration process and would enforce decisions based on it.

Whether the Ontario government actually agreed or encouraged this is unclear. Transparency isn’t a part of this process either. But the veneration of multiculturalism is deep in Ontario and it is all of a piece that the present Liberal government would have regarded some official implementation of sharia as an enhancement of “diversity”. Still, it took only the announcement in May of the setting up of Ali’s tribunals to electrify the issue. Multiculturalism, feminism, Islamism and secularism were on a collision course.

The result has been some spectacular ideological gymnastics. Feminists, long advocates of special laws for women, faced with the distinctly pro-life and pro-family definition of female equality in Islam, discovered the merits of identical laws for everyone. Muslim feminists faced with the daunting problem of reconciling adherence to the Koran with women’s rights emphasised that they were not against sharia but that “Muslim family law in other countries is not woman-positive” — a resolution of conflicting stands about as credible as pelmet burqas.

Anticipating the reaction of even the most avidly multicultural Canadian to flogging and amputation (which feature prominently in sharia), the Canadian Council of Muslim Women suggested that if sharia family law was to be given standing, “why not bring in the whole system and implement sharia criminal law as well?” Faced with a hullabaloo, the Ontario government took cover and announced in June that the Arbitration Act would be studied by Marion Boyd, a former attorney-general and minister responsible for women’s issues. Cognisant of the delicacy of seeming to focus on Islam, the press release was written in new socialist-speak: her mandate was to review the Arbitration Act in terms of its impact on “all vulnerable people” as well as “the concerns of women, the disabled and the frail elderly across Ontario”. It conjured up a Monty Python starting line for the marathon.

The attempts to get sharia parity with the laws of secular countries is part of Islam’s new thrust. That it is even being considered reflects the changing demographics of the western world. Canada has 600,000 Muslims who, apart from its co-founding French- Canadians, form the largest single minority in the country. They are, as in Britain, increasingly organised and significant in electoral politics.

Canada, like most of the western world, is an abortion culture as well as one in which it is fairly common for women not to start families until their mid-thirties or even forties because of careers. When such a society is confronted with a large minority group in its midst that has on average — and I’m guessing unscientifically since statistics aren’t available — 3½ children per female, while we have on average half a child, society will fundamentally change in 25 or 50 years.

Different countries react to this possibility in different ways. Some, like France, ban such visible symbols of Islam as the headscarf from schools in the name of secularism while establishing a state- sponsored religious Muslim council to train home-grown imams who might be more compatible with French values than foreign ones.

Britain muddles on. Understanding that banning headscarves is abhorrent, it chooses instead to ban its own cultural manifestations such as school nativity plays or Christmas trees. Canada’s actions are those of the ultra-liberal state with all its virtues and flaws but with a reluctance to grasp the nettle.

The controversy is an example of our generation losing sight of something that previous generations have always known, namely that there is nothing wrong with people preferring to settle their commercial or domestic disputes through their own institutions. In a free society, if Jews, Romanies or Muslims want to go to their rabbi, gypsy king or imam to settle civil matters instead of suing each other in a court of law, it should be, as it has always been, a fundamental right. Many groups have done it informally for donkey’s years.

The key, though, is “informally’. The problem arises when the state begins to recognise and give official status to tribal or religious laws. The danger comes from sanctioning parallel systems of justice, thereby fostering the fragmentation of society and raising the spectre of a theocratic encroachment on the secular state.

Although many communities have used informal conflict resolution through their own tribal or religious arbitrators, only Muslims have sought to formalise such a parallel legal system.

Islamic law is complex and its many adherents vary widely in their interpretations of it. But as in any religion, the point of expansion is at the fundamentalist edge. This is true for Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Fundamentalists take their religion very seriously and hark back to it almost as a medieval construct. Those elements of a faith that seek relevance by reducing religiosity — taking nuns out of habits — only lose adherents. This becomes a problem when the fundamentalists of a group are either so aggressive or so expansive that they become the dominant force.

Muslim fundamentalists are self-evidently more vigorous than their evangelical Christian or their ultra-orthodox Jewish counterparts and contain people who have no desire to be British, Canadian or anything but Islamists. This sort of fundamentalist comes to a country more like an invader than an immigrant. They do not want to “Canadianise” Islam as Syed Mumtaz Ali ingenuously claims, they want to Islamise Canada or Britain or France.

All this makes a critique of the intricacies of Islam or a compromise with it — which is inevitably the approach of the liberals when difficulties arise — quite irrelevant.

Whether you find Islam notionally more attractive than western materialism or better or worse for women is not the issue. The minute Islam reaches a critical number in any population, it will attempt in one way or another to impose its values on the society around it (including moderate Muslims) or minimally fragment the larger society by insisting on separate treatment and an adjustment by everyone to suit the convenience of Islamic practices.

The wishful notion of the BBC’s Laura Trevelyan in her Newsnight report last week that perhaps “sharia courts in Canada are an opportunity to show the world a modern face of Islam” is looking through the the wrong end of the telescope.

Being nice to revolutionaries may give you a brief idyll with Kerensky, but give them an opening and it is the Leninists who will ultimately take power. Trevelyan and I will not be interviewing but trailing behind the men in our full-length burqas.