Discourses of Shari‘a Law and Muslim Women: A Critical Reflection on Sharia in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2005, the National Film Board of Canada released the documentary Sharia in Canada , which had been produced in the midst of the massive legal and public discussions following Ontario’s Islamic Institute of Civil Justice’s announcement that, under the Ontario Arbitration Act, Muslims could resolve their family disputes through faith-based arbitration. The documentary offers a remarkable case study in the intersections of imperialist and sexist discourses, in its characterizations of arranged marriages, intolerance of homosexuality, lapidation for adultery, domestic violence, and the practice of the hijab to the identity politics of multiculturalism. This article unpacks these intersections by focusing on critics of faith-based arbitration as featured in the documentary—critics who overwhelmingly self-identified as Muslims or as descendents of Muslims. Their arguments divide women into two categories: enlightened subjects, who can make informed decisions, and oppressed subjects, who need to be rescued. While such representations feed into longstanding Orientalist discourses, they also indicate a shift in those same tropes —for now it is brown women and brown men who shall save brown women from brown men. From this perspective, the article underscores the ways insiders participate in the colonial narrative and afford a powerful voice to Islamophobic and civilizational projects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".