Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration ed. by Anna C. Korteweg and Jennifer A. Selby (review)

Ontario’s faith-based family law arbitration controversy was profoundly gendered. Two men bookended it: in 2003 lawyer Syed Mumtaz Ali announced that the Islamic Institute for Civil Justice (IICJ) would conduct family law arbitrations based on Islamic principles, and in 2005 Premier Dalton McGuinty announced that the province would amend the Arbitration Act to ban religious arbitration. Women were pivotal to this controversy, which was dominated by the contention that women seeking religious divorce would be negatively impacted by arbitrators imposing sharia law. The contributors to Debating Sharia challenge this contention, invoking concepts of privatization, agency, critical faith-centred feminism, racialization, multiculturalism, and secularism to forge constructive dialogues about religion, law, and gender. In the foreword, Jocelyne Cesari frames this challenge in terms of culture, asking whether agreement on shared cultural values remains possible. Paradoxically, “for Muslims, the answers tend to be in the affirmative, whereas non-Muslims tend to answer negatively.”

The book has six parts. Part 1, “Practising Religious Divorce among North American Muslims,” reports two ethnographic projects. Julie Macfarlane interviewed 214 imams, religious scholars, community leaders, social workers, and divorced individuals and concluded that the processes followed in most Muslim divorce cases bore “little or no resemblance to a formal arbitration.” Christopher Cutting interviewed thirty leaders, lawyers, and social workers working in three organizations and confirmed that the “overwhelming majority” of clients were women seeking Muslim divorce, not arbitration.

In part 2, “Regulating Faith-Based Arbitration,” Audrey Macklin argues against casting the arbitration controversy as a “prototypical multicultural dilemma” because this approach obscures and depoliticizes the real issue – the privatization of family law. Acknowledging this privatization, Faisal Kutty labels denying Muslims the opportunity to indigenize Islamic legal rulings as hypocrisy and observes that Islamic legal doctrine includes creative methodologies of reinterpretation that “can serve as rich sources for more gender-friendly practices.”

The contributors to part 3, “Defining Islamic Law in the West,” focus mainly on sharia. For L. Clarke, essentialism taints the understanding of sharia, reducing it to a “kind of compulsory consciousness” about the negative perceptions of gender and reflecting less on its merits than on who has the authority to represent the Muslim community. Anver M. Emon also takes issue with conceptualizing sharia as a determinate, narrowly constructed, unchanging code of law and attributes this reductive reading to colonial administrators while advocating a contemporary alternative – a “marketplace” of Islamic legal ideas in which multiple voices express competing visions.

A debate between contributors surfaces in part 4, “Negotiating the Politics of Sharia-Based Arbitration.” As an executive member of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, Nevin Reda opposed the IICJ proposal, contending that it compromised three main principles in the Qur’an: monotheism, freedom of religion, and consultation. Working for the Islamic Society of North America-Canada, Katherine Bullock advocated faith-based arbitration, maintaining that “religious Muslim women have agency and are no more or less inclined to suffer from negative family pressure than any other women.”

In part 5, “Analysing Discourses of Race, Gender and Religion,” Jasmine Zine, employing “critical faith-centred feminism,” cogently argues that subaltern women’s voices were never heard in the debates. Anna C. Korteweg evokes two representations of agency – as contingent on resistance to Islam or as embedded in religious (and other) contexts – to explain that the media privileged the former even though the latter is more likely to facilitate women’s capacity to act.

Part 6, “Managing Religion in the Canadian State,” foregrounds two public policies. Alexandra Brown critiques the Boyd Report as an artifact of “official” multiculturalism, the public policy that represents the state as an agent whose task is to resolve (but never instigate) conflicting differences. Jennifer A. Selby analyzes secularism as a public policy that is intertwined with Christianity, blurs the distinction between private and public spheres, and privileges a specific feminist politics that silences the political participation of some religiously practising Muslim...