A moral panic arose in Canada even though no law had actually changed

Evidence

In late November of 2003, Syed Mumtaz Ali, a retired lawyer, announced to the media that a new organization, the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice, had been established. The organization planned to apply Islamic principles of family and inheritance law to resolve family law and inheritance disputes within the Muslim community in Canada, services he described as the application of Sharia law. (Sharia Law is not a codified set of laws but rather a framework for interpreting laws based on the Qu’ran and the Hadith.) The Arbitration Act already permitted the resolution of private disputes in this way and had done so for a decade, but Ali’s announcement created the impression that something had changed in law that now made it easier to apply Sharia. The panic that ensued, from the fear that Sharia law (with its associated images of women being stoned to death) had now come to Canadian shores, was of such a magnitude that the federal government, pressed to set up an inquiry into the Arbitration Act, was ultimately obliged to clarify that it had not changed the law and that it had not collaborated with the newly formed Islamic Institute. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 345

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Sharia law as a non-codified interpretive framework rather than a fixed legal code — a clarifying point the whole chapter turns on.
• XREF: Connects to the moral panic framework from Cohen used in the reader’s earlier reading on the Lawrence case; also to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s pattern of panic over perceived cultural threat.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: why did a law unchanged for a decade suddenly trigger panic — what made 2003 the flashpoint?