Faith-based arbitration was already legal for a decade before the Sharia panic

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. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 345