Shariat Law in Ontario ?

Bismi'llah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim...for the sake of Prophet Muhammad saws and Sheikh Nazim may Allah protect his secret.

Here´s my last post on Blog Ladder from yesterday which addresses a fairly important issue.

Today´s entry #4.

Recently Nis informed me that Ontario Province in Canada was considering letting Muslims judge themselves on certain issues, like divorce and child custody, by Islamic shariat law. (See comments to post on 9th September.) He asked me for my “take” on it.I´ve been a bit busy and a bit stressed recently with all the stuff around Bilquis´s health problems and the return to our home in need of certain attentions.

Anyway, I´ve given it a bit of thought meanwhile and just want to point out a couple of things First of all around the matter of Islamic qualifications for making judgements.

Normally for someone to be able to make judgements within the Islamic Shariat it is necessary to have a very rigorous education. Normally this includes much memorisation of both Quran and Hadith and years of study and training.. Obviously most people know what Quran is but there is perhaps some general lack of information as to what hadith is. In order to find something out about this I would refer the reader to these two sites.Hadith and sunna and Mishkat al Masabih .
Basically Hadith are authenticated sayings of the Prophet (pbuh) and descriptions of his actions which are the twin source of Islamic law together with the Koran.

The first point then is the realistic possibility of finding people who are suitably educated.Given that this were possible one then has to consider that the situation in which nearly all Muslims live these days is not Islamic. The countries that they live in and the people whom they are surrounded by do not conform to Islamic law and therefore the circumstances are extraordinary with regard to the application of Shariat.

The second point is the wisdom that is necessary for anyone to be able to execute Islamic law under these circumstances. It is simply no use applying traditional Islamic law straight from text book examples when the extenuating circumstances have never existed in any Islamic situation before and it would be very hard to find any similar text book examples from which to make a judgement.The situation is a very delicate one and primed to be explosive.

The living wisdom and inspiration granted to an illuminated person such as Sheikh Nazim when applied to new Muslims living in western situations has often raised a few eyebrows in Islamic quarters although it is easy to see the deep wisdom in allowing certain flexibilities and unorthodox methods when dealing with these unusual and, until now, unknown circumstances.

So first of all one has to be sure that there are the necessary traditional requirements to know shariat law and then one has to be sure that there is the necessary wisdom to apply it.

Having said that I would also like to mention that I think that it is very open minded of the Ontarians (?) to consider such a proposal and very encouraging that the Muslims have been taken seriously in the needs of their legal circumstances and family life and traditions. Perhaps under carefully controlled or rather monitored, conditions it would be an interesting and fruitful experiment which could lead to similar solutions in other multi cultural communities.