Constructions of Islam in the Controversy of Religious Arbitration: A Consideration of the "Shari'a Debate" in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2003 Ontario, Canada became the focus of heated national and international debate when it engaged citizens in a debate over the use of religious, and specifically Islamic, law in private arbitration disputes. A government commission which canvassed Ontarians for their perspective on the issue lies at the center of the debate. Marion Boyd's 2004 report, "Dispute Resolution in Family Law: Protecting Choice, Promoting Inclusion" describes and analyzes the results. A government document aimed at presenting the findings and recommendations of the commission to a wider public, this report encapsulates many ofthe ideas and attitudes prevalent among Ontarians on the issue of religious, and specifically Muslim, arbitration practices. The Boyd report is a valuable indication of some of the most fundamental and uncritically considered assumptions about Islam at work in government policy and public opinion. In this thesis I uncover two primary models of Islam that Boyd's report constructs, and relate these constructions to their larger contexts. The first treats religion as a static entity distinct from culture, while the second expands religious identity to the point that it becomes a culture itself. After outlining each, I suggest that these definitions are the product of the two overlapping contexts in which the report is embedded. The first is a Canadian public space defining Islam in terms of popular notions of multiculturalism, and the second a transnational and globalizing space constructing Islam as a neoethnicity. The definitions of Islam contained in the report draw on these two frameworks and maintain familiar conceptual categories which render Islam and Muslim identity more easily understood and accepted by the public.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.079 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".