Thank you.
In my testimony, I'm going to say something about the work that I did in 2010 to 2012 and a bit beyond that in working with Muslim community members in Canada and in the U.S., and what I learned about Islamophobia as somebody coming very new and very ignorant to this area. I want to say a bit about events post October 7. Although I don't have empirical data, I do have some observations on that point. Finally, I have a couple of suggestions as to measures to build on my colleagues' points, which you've already heard.
When I began to study the role of Islamic laws and the ways in which North American Muslims conducted their marriages and divorces, I was doing so because all I had heard about this from the media was that it was a very bad and terrifying thing. In fact, I distinctly remember a student coming into my office one day at the university and saying to me, “I'd like to write a paper on sharia law.” I asked, “Well, what do you know about sharia law?” They said, “Well, nothing, but I know it's really bad.”
I think that was a summary, in some ways, for what I discovered over the subsequent years of my research: lots of lack of knowledge and information and lots of prejudice in a way that was truly astonishing to me. I am extremely grateful for the coaching I received from imams and members of the communities as I found my way through to do this research and to talk with people about a very sensitive subject, obviously, which is how they handle their family transitions, both marriage and divorce.
The first thing I learned was that sharia law is a term that's been made up by the western media. There is sharia, and there is Islamic law, and they are two different things. Sharia is the path that Muslims follow in order to live a good life. It's a totally personal experience. As one imam once told me, there is a sharia for every Muslim in Canada, which I thought really encapsulated this.
This was one of the first sort of staggering revelations that I had: That rather than being something that, as the media would have it, Muslims wanted to inflict on everybody—this horrible-sounding sharia law that seemed to involve lots of nasty punishments—sharia was in fact a deeply personal value system, which did vary from person to person, and Islamic law was the principles that had been built out of the Quranic texts and the Hadith by jurisprudence in the fourth century onwards. Of course, these were male jurists, so a lot of that jurisprudence is somewhat male-centric, which is a tendency of every single western system that was developed in the fourth century—and still some today.
I first of all realized that there was a lot of ignorance that created fear, and that in actual fact this idea that there was some kind of deep, seething resentment going along inside Muslim communities in Canada and the U.S., in which they desperately wanted other people to accept their system, was completely baseless. There was no basis for that. I asked people and talked to people constantly in hundreds of interviews about this, and I never heard a single person in that group say that they thought sharia should be imposed on non-Muslims. If you take that out of the picture, then you understand a great deal more about the fear and prejudice that have developed toward the Muslim community, and its lack of basis.
In terms of some measures that I think are super important as a result of that work, working with the imams is really important, because the imams are a very, very important source of influence, and they're also family problem-solvers in many communities. I think there need to be some clear standards around dealing with domestic violence, and, obviously, there's an issue of women's governance in mosques, but certainly it's important to work with the imams.
It's also important, I believe, to work with kids at school—