Pre-existing narratives, not actual events, primed the moral panic over Sharia

Evidence

The tracks for making Syed Ali’s announcement into a moral panic were well worn. Headlines on the barbarism of Sharia itself were appearing as early as 2001, and media reports of the story of Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning, prepared the ground for the now familiar theme of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between Islam and the West. The events of September 11, 2001 simply escalated the clash. The November 2003 headlines on Sharia that announced the Islamic Institute’s plans alerted Canadians that they were on the brink of their own fateful encounter between Islam and the West, a swift descent from the ideals of the British Empire to a barbaric multicultural present, in short, from ‘Britannia to Sharia.’ The headlines warned of ‘legal apartheid,’ and suggested ominously that ‘religious law undermines loyalty to Canada.’ Sharia was above all ‘un-Canadian.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 346

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a single foreign news story (Amina Lawal’s stoning sentence) became the template through which a decade-old domestic legal practice was re-read as a civilizational threat.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s moral-panic material on dress panics and the ‘barbaric multicultural present’ framing parallels the civilizational rhetoric in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Anti-sharia testimony framed lawful Muslim practice as a seditious, lawless threat; The produced moral panic far exceeds the actual terrorist threat — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 762; Wealthy right-wing networks fabricated the sharia law panic — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 277