Ace, fwiw I sympathize and think your point is worthy of discussion, and not derailment, accusations of Islamaphobia, and false equivs.
On the flip side, I think the actual protesters are disengenous. It’s not like they were marching eight months ago. I stupidly give them the benefit of the doubt on “Free speech rallies” cause they highlight the hypocrisy of far-left extremists. But when only 5% of the protesters can tell me what Sharia law is (a number I pulled out of my ass), Im going to call BS on them. Not ON YOU, but on them.
No you should call BS on him as well. All of his posts in this thread display an amazing lack of awareness of the actual current implementation of religious courts in the US let alone any idea of what Sharia law might actually be.
4 marriages allowed for men, not for women… Wouldn’t like to add the medieval punishments for adultery, blasphemy and crimes such as theft in Sharia law. It’s a medieval cancer.
After every 100 cancerous features of Sharia, if there are 1-2 non-cancerous features and you want implement these features, then pls don’t call it Sharia.
In India also, it is illegal. But only for non-Muslims. But it is allowed for Muslim men. Mullah wanted uniform criminal code, same as the one for non-muslims (so that he could avoid Sharia medieval punishments for theft etc.) And wanted a seperate civil code so that he could exploit the women. So Muslims in India got a seperate civil code under which women are exploited by the men. Read up on the Shah Banu (an old divorced Muslim woman) case for ex.
What about a march against Christian law? Eight of the Ten Commandments have never been codified into law in the United States, nor by any individual state. Time to ban anyone from holding themseoves bound to any of them in their own personal relationships.
In Canada, about 3.2% of the population is Muslim (in the USA it’s about 1%). 7.7% of the population of the Greater Toronto Area are Muslims, and 6% of the population of Montreal are Muslims. Aside from a few bigots shoot their mouths off, Muslims are well received here. During our last election, the when the Conservatives were making their sprint to the finish, they blew their dog-whistle over whether veils should be worn during oaths. They lost by a landslide. For example, shortly their loss, the new Liberal government proposed taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees, which received massive support from the public, and that support has continued now that they’ve arrived. The take-home from all this is that these folks are very welcome here, they help us be a better country, and we deal with issues concerning conflict of laws with respect and consideration (as we’ll get into herein below).
Most of the Muslims here are Sunni, although there are significant Shia Twelver and Ismaili communities and Ahmadiyya communities. As is typical for religious sects, they don’t all play well in the sandbox together. It’s the same old shit of my religious dogma is legit and yours is not. Mixed into this is how adherence to religious dogma combined with a quite natural tendency to look inward to one’s own community when deposited in a somewhat alien country. In terms of community leaders and their associations, some are more conservative and some are more liberal. There is a fair bit of pubic discussion between the various sects (and TVO – Television Ontario’s Steve Paiken has done an excellent job for over a decade in ensuring opportunities for public broadcast of such discussions to be broadcast and let loose on the web). The ones who appear to be taking the lead are liberal, progressive and support separation of religion and state. For example, here’s a vid of Tarek Fatah making submissions on Canadian-Muslim terrorism to a Canadian Parliamentary Senate Committee https://youtu.be/sdxmYpkCqFM (it gets heated in the last two and a half minutes), and a vid of him being interviewed by conservative Jew Ezra Levant about Fatah more or less by chance ending up with a 100 million viewer TV show in India https://youtu.be/zdohEAls9ls . What is notable is that he and other progressive Muslims are taking the bull by the horns in directly confronting radicalization by Muslim communities whose dogma is focused on Islam v. the infidel. That puts terrorism out there on the table for full and frank discussion, and by doing so, gets information out and helps answer questions that Canadians of all walks of life reasonably may have. Farzana Hassan directly address orthodoxy and armed Jihad, and women’s place in Islam (for example, jump to 10:30 https://youtu.be/XJ2nEBDms0g?t=2m42s ). Islamic radicalization in Canada is not a matter of white Canadians v. immigrant Muslims. It is a matter of all of us, in which the various Muslim communities are taking the lead in working to prevent radicalization. When you have frank, open discussions, it goes a long way to helping recognize that your neighbouring Muslim is not a monster set to destroy us, but rather is just another Canadian, albeit one with a few different traditions, and with a slightly high probability of having a problem child that needs special attention. (And for folks south of the border who are thinking “Pollyanna, you’re going to get blown up,” just remember that we’re still one hell of a lot safer in Canada than where you are with so many millions of you holding a religious-like-belief in your constitutionally protected gun cult.)
So where does that leave us as far as Sharia law goes? First of all, one has to ask “Just what specifically is Sharia law?” The answer depends on who you talk to. By analogy, in a Christian context it’s a bit like asking “What is Ecclesiastical law?” to which the answer is “It depends on which sect is asserting authority,” and with various sects each thinking the other is not Christian, and with a history of killing off each other and warring with each other you simply can’t say that there is a single Ecclesiastical law. Well, you can’t say that there is a single Sharia law either, for just as with Christianity, each sect asserts that it knows and follows God’s will, and that the other sects range from not being as righteous to being part of the religion at all. So although religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, are based on power and control, forget about finding a single source of Ecclesiastical or Sharia law, for there is no such beast.
That leaves us here in Canada with laws that are pretty good, including a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that is key to our living tree modeled Constitution Living tree doctrine - Wikipedia , that makes possible for us to expand human rights rather than get trapped in a regressive strict constructionist dungeon.
So what have we been up to in Canada to welcome the influx of Muslims from various sects to try to find a balance between our laws and their traditions and laws? The big issues tend to arise in family law, for in some Muslim nations, women’s rights and children’s rights are obscenely pathetic compared to women’s rights in Canada (and let’s be clear: women’s rights and minority rights in Canada have a long way to go still). So let’s have a look at how our law in Canada handles the conflicts of law between our law here (in my example let’s assume the Province of Ontario’s body of family law – ‘cause that’s where I practice) and the law that a Muslim family moving to Canada might bring with them, either formally through Sharia based contracts made in their previous country’s jurisdiction, or through Sharia based traditions that they practised in their previous country.
Let’s start by touching on some of the issues that regularly come up when dealing with family matters for people who come from a Sharia law based jurisdiction.
At its foundation, there is an area of law called “conflict of laws” in which we try to muddle out which law should [del]trump[/del] rule when two laws of two different jurisdictions bump heads. If someone makes a domestic contract in Bangladesh or Saudi Arabia, where it is a binding contract, is it still a binding contract in Canada? This issue has been run through the courts, who have determined that yes, in general domestic contracts made under a Sharia law based jurisdiction remain binding in Canada (just as American marriage contracts are almost always binding in Canada despite not having been made under Canadian law), but the devil is in the details, for sometimes specific terms of the Sharia contract clash with Canadian policy, depending on the country and the sects where the contract was made. From a previous post http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9460777&postcount=85 ,here are conflict of laws issues between Sharia law as it is practices in some countries, and Canadian law. Many of these issues (but not the criminal law issues) are what I deal with as a Canadian family lawyer when working with Muslim clients who come from countries using Sharia based or Sharia influenced law.
In any given matter, that can leave a lot to unpack before being able to resolve the issue. We start by looking at the Sharia based domestic contract and seeing if it was properly made under the jurisdiction in which it was made, then we look at if there are any terms in it that would be contrary to Ontario policy or specific Ontario statute (such as the Family Law Act s.56 https://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/stat/rso-1990-c-f3/latest/rso-1990-c-f3.html#sec56subsec1 ). If it was made under duress or without a party not understanding it, then it goes in the metaphorical shredder. If a clause does not put the best interests of the children first (for example by decreeing who will have custody rather than taking into account all relevant factors, or by not paying enough child support), then we scratch that clause out.
On the property and spousal support side of things, we have to the deal with the Mahr (a payment made prior to the marriage by the man, or a promise made prior to the marriage by the man to make a payment at a later date, to the woman to take care of her financially should he die or should they divorce). Sometimes the Mahr is huge. Sometimes the Mahr is miniscule. Often the Mahr is out of whack with what Canadians would find reasonable for an equalization of net family properties and spousal support. This is an area of family law that is very active, for the courts are still struggling to find a way of being fair to both parties. Presently, the leading decisions have taken a logical approach: the Mahr was a premarital asset belonging to the woman because either it was delivered or promised prior to the marriage, so it is exempt from being included in her asset base at date of separation that otherwise would be split with the ex as part of the equalization process. That leaves the possibility of the poor bastard possibly having given everything he had prior to marriage in the Mahr and then having to give a further half of everything he had accrued (on a net basis) after marriage to her. Fortunately, the court has the discretion to deal with this problem equitably, but it will take a few more years of decisions to fine tune it. As far as men dodging spousal support based on having paid a less than sufficient Mahr goes, the courts are not having any of it, so that opens up the possibility of a combination of Mahr and spousal support being double dipping. Again, the courts have the discretion to deal with this, but it will take time to dial it in.
Many Muslims initially from Sharia law based jurisdictions are not too thrilled about being run through a Canadian court process that does not mesh well with the laws and customs to which they were accustomed. The solution has been to put legislation in place that permits the parties to have their own religious based binding arbitration in family matters, with the provisos that such arbitration must apply substantive Canadian law. The goal is to permit people to have as much flexibility as possible but still follow Canadian law rather than hold to external laws that may run contrary to the values upon which Canadian laws are based.
That still leaves open the problem of young married women moving to Canada, raising family, and somewhere along the line realizing that they want out of the marriage, but not having the linguistic skills to make it on their own financially other than at a minimum wage level. Our laws can protect them financially, by providing free lawyers who will use our laws to open up their husbands’ pockets, but what we cannot protect them from is themselves, for often there is tremendous social pressure from their communities placed on divorced women. “What will they think?” is the phrase I hear time and time again. Take all of the challenges facing a person when trying to leave a profoundly flawed marriage, ranging from trying not to increase instability in the children’s lives, to the emotional challenge of untangling one’s self from an abuse spouse, to becoming financial self-sufficient, and then add to it having your own community – the only support you have in a very big, very empty country at the other side of the world from where you grew up – at best puts you under tremendous pressure to stay in your marriage, and at worst turns its back toward you viciously gossips about how you are at fault for the failure of your marriage. That’s a very lonely ocean to be cut adrift upon.
My hope is that as Muslim communities grow and thrive in Canada, as non-fundamentalist leaders such as Fatah and Hassan promote human rights, and as second generation children are raised with a foot in both traditional Muslim communities and Canadian communities.
The one thing that I am certain of is that Sharia based family law that does not put the best interests of the children first or treats men and women unequally under the law will never get its foot in the door in Canada. People who protest against Muslims out of fear that Sharia law will become part of Canadian law either do not know what they are talking about or are bigots. People who protest against Muslims out of fear of terrorism have a valid point, for there have been and there will continue to be some second generation fundamentalist Muslim-Canadians who turn to terrorism, just as there will continue to be terrorism in Canada against Muslims – bear in mind that it was six Muslims who were killed and nineteen Muslims who were wounded as a result of Trump’s stochastic terrorism. That makes it all the more important to work with Muslim communities rather than use the empty threat of Sharia law as an excuse to hate and hurt them.
