Getting past our hysteria over Islam

Haroon Siddiqui is the editor emeritus of Canada's largest circulated daily paper the Toronto Star. He has had a long career in journalism and now writes a regular column. IN his most current one he explain the brouhaha over the Archbishop's Sharia Law comments.- t

His sin was that he spoke of the sharia, even though he ruled out most of it: "Nobody in their right mind," he told the BBC, "would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that sometimes appears to be associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states – the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women."

Even for religious arbitration, he had caveats: that it be voluntary and its rulings conform to civil law.

This is precisely what Marion Boyd of the Ontario sharia panel had said. Many didn't want to hear her and many don't want to listen to the archbishop. It is instructive as to who opposed him the most:

Conservative Christians angry at his support for gay rights and not enough support for preserving the biblical basis of British law. Those rightly angry at the plight of Christians in Muslim lands but who hold the wrong notion of holding Muslims in the West as hostage to obtain reciprocity. Those who think there is a strict separation between church and state, when there isn't. In Britain, the Queen is the head of the Anglican church and in Ontario, there's funding for Catholic schools and – until Premier Dalton McGuinty finds a way out, as he says he will – there's the Lord's Prayer at the Legislature.

The invocation is innocuous. Religious arbitration involves a few hundred people at best. Most of us oppose funding for private schools. But we all should worry about this:

In the Muslim world, they take to the streets on the subject of Islam. Here, we get hysterical. One is often violent, the other never is. But the result is about the same: No "critical and intelligent" engagement of the sort the archbishop was looking for, even if he has a tin ear for prevailing public opinion.