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TORONTO, CANADA, August 3, 2004: When the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau declared that his dream for Canada would be a nation where citizens from different cultural backgrounds could live in harmony, he probably did not envision that the secular laws of Canada and the religious laws of a particular culture would differ so vastly. The article explains, “A group called the Canadian Society of Muslims is testing those boundaries by establishing the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice to apply the legal code called Shariah, based on the Koran, to settle disputes over property, inheritance, marriage and divorce. The Muslim group is acting under an Ontario provincial law passed in 1991 that gave religious authorities the power to arbitrate civil matters as long as the people seeking arbitration do so voluntarily and are free to appeal those decisions in Canadian courts.” Apparently this Ontario law has worked well for both Jews and Christians in the past in settling marriage and business disputes in their congregations. However, the Islamic Institute wants to decide matters that for some Canadians directly contradict the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Syed Mumtaz Ali, a 77-year-old Islamic lawyer says, “Basically, Muslims live a different kind of life from the Western life, which is secular. Everything we do is governed by religious law.” The article says, “For Mr. Ali, it is perfectly acceptable that a son receive twice the inheritance of a daughter and that a man have the automatic right to divorce while a woman does not.” Shahira Hafez, a 53-year-old Egyptian-born anesthesiologist, who is also treasurer of the Canadian Council of Muslim women expresses her concerns about the application of the 1991 law for Muslims, “I don’t see how it can be voluntary when all these women from Pakistan, India and Afghanistan are kept isolated in their own communities, do not learn English and only deal with the outer society through their husband and their husband’s family.” H. Donald Forbes, a political science professor at the University of Toronto says, “I think Mr. Trudeau would have gone along with the idea of Shariah tribunals. As long as the arbitration is voluntary, Mr. Trudeau would probably have concluded that this kind of meaningful accommodation was in the spirit of multiculturalism.”

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