OTTAWA (CP) - It seems a long way from the London terrorist bombings to a public policy debate in Canada over family arbitration reforms.
But each has sparked a heated debate on both sides of the Atlantic over the merits of multiculturalism as state policy and the role of what some call "political Islam" in secular societies.
In Europe, there is deep introspection over the terrifying reality of "homegrown" terrorists attacking open societies from within.
In Canada, from Quebec to Alberta, there has been spirited public sparring over proposals to permit Muslim Sharia religious arbitration in civil disputes.
Alienation and integration are the themes that bond these two seemingly disparate debates.
Marion Boyd, a former Ontario attorney general, has recommended changing the province's 14-year-old arbitration act to continue permitting religious arbitration, but with new oversight mechanisms and safeguards.
Religious family arbitration, she argues, "is one of the ways to keep the alienation and the disaffection of people under some control."
Yet at the same time, Boyd says Canada must do far more to educate newcomers about the legal reality of the state.
"That's been a criticism for a long time from groups that are working to settle immigrants and refugees," she said in an interview
"There just is far too little legal education. People don't understand what their rights and obligations are."
Compare that to a recent speech by Trevor Phillips, the head of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality.
Five days after the July 7 bombings in London, Phillips launched a new race relations guide while excoriating "the divisive and stultifying effects of old-style, corporate multiculturalism."
"Aren't we compelled to ask whether a policy which puts recognition of difference before equality merely ensures that - while we salve our consciences by paying lip service to diversity - we deny some people the same life chances as most of us?" asked Phillips.
He warned that British communities are "in danger of sleepwalking into a kind of passive co-existence in which a friendly distance today will become an armed stand-off tomorrow."
This apocalyptic language comes from the black, Labour-appointed head of a government agency.
Couldn't happen in Canada?
Boyd's report on Ontario arbitration of December 2004 sparked language almost as strong.
Alia Hogben, president of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, has called Sharia family arbitration "an abuse of multiculturalism."
Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress recently called it "multiculturalism run amok."
Homa Arjomand, an Iranian immigrant who's spearheading an international movement to stop the Ontario reforms, said Sharia family law exposes multiculturalism's flaw: "ghettoism. I'm talking about isolating minorities from mainstream society.
"That leaves them vulnerable to any kind of advertising or provoking or promoting," she said in an interview. "This is what I'm so worried about."
Indeed, all sides of the debate - whether in Europe or North America - have powerful reactions to the threat of domestic terrorism in the name of imported ideologies.
Wahida Valiante of the Canadian Islamic Congress, which endorses Boyd's reforms, says the repeated references to "homegrown terrorists" among Muslim communities incites hatred.
"'Homegrown! homegrown!' I mean, this is scary stuff," said Valiante.
"I don't know where the homegrowns are. I move around the community. What frightens us is if this rhetoric doesn't die down and the government takes no notice, we Muslims are in for a rough ride."
But, she added, "Canadians are definitely not going to buy into it wholesale. They're much more well informed. They're much more tolerant."
Indeed, the Ontario case for allowing Sharia family arbitration essentially boils down to that most Canadian of values: equitable treatment for all under the law.
As B'nai Brith argued to Boyd, the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides for faith-based groups to run arbitration courts for family law matters.
"If we are truly to be an open and pluralistic society in Canada, then the different religious practices making up Canada's mosaic must be accommodated."
But as more than a few critics have noted, Islam does not accept the separation of religious and state power, and that brings a whole new set of issues.
Islam literally means submission to the will of God.
Canada, as the recent battle over same-sex marriage clearly illustrated, is a country wedded to the supremacy of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Can Islam fit its square peg in this round hole?
The leading public advocate of Sharia family courts in Ontario, Syed Mumtaz Ali, has consistently argued that the Charter freedom to practice one's religion "connote(s) a completely different meaning when used in the context of Islam/Muslim religion."
Mumtaz Ali, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, makes the explicit case on the website of the Canadian Society of Muslims.
"There is no separation of state and church, the temporal and the spiritual, unlike the Christian system of secularism. For a Muslim, 'practice' of his/her religion ... is a full-time, 24-hour occupation."
Critics cite such beliefs as fundamentally at odds with assurances that Sharia-based family arbitration will always fall under the mantle of Ontario law and the Charter.
As the Law Commission of Canada noted in a summation of briefs received by Boyd last fall, Mumtaz Ali and his Islamic Institute of Civil Justice have a flawed perception of Charter rights.
"What is unique about Mumtaz Ali's characterization of this issue that is disturbing to many Canadians both Muslim and non-Muslim, is his vision that this process of family arbitration is but one step toward a separate system of justice for Muslims where they would be permitted to govern their own affairs in the realm of civil law.
"Religious freedom and multiculturalism do not imply a right to sovereignty . . . ."
Yet this view of "political Islam" holds a powerful appeal, especially for large Muslim communities isolated and feeling under siege within non-Islamic states.
This has become acute in some European cities, such as Amsterdam, where Muslim immigrants make up as much as 25 per cent of the population.
Toronto, by contrast, has Canada's largest Muslim community (61 per cent of Canada's 580,000 Muslims live in Ontario) yet Muslims make up less than seven per cent of Toronto's population, according to the 2001 census.
Paul Scheffer, an urban sociologist at the University of Amsterdam, believes Canada is 10 years behind the Netherlands in its discourse on multiculturalism's practical flaws.
The Islamist-fuelled slaughter of film maker Theo van Gogh - and the current trial in which the accused killer is refusing to acknowledge the Dutch court's jurisdiction - is simply highlighting a problem that's been discussed for several years, he said.
"People have never been told that their rights go together with obligations," Scheffer said from his Amsterdam home. "We have simply been looking the other way in the name of tolerance."
Islam, with its fundamental blurring of church and state, is particularly problematic in this regard, argues Scheffer.
"People have to re-invent what it means to be a minority in a secular environment. That's a very difficult and painful process of adaptation."
Scheffer says Canada has done a better job than Europe of integrating immigrants into the economy - he credits Canada's merit-based points system - but argues this country will be "the exception" if it avoids Muslim integration issues down the road.
Valiante, a national vice-president with Canadian Islamic Congress, counters that Canada has nothing to learn about multiculturalism from Europe, where she says too many intellectuals suffer from amnesia.
She held up the example of Spain in the middle ages under the Moors.
"It was one of the most golden ages in Europe, not only knowledge-wise but for how socially integrated the society was with the Jews and the Muslims and Christians living side by side. That is a historical fact."
But it is also a 600-year-old example.
More fundamentally, it simply highlights that the enlightened Moors of the time allowed Christians and Jews to run their own separate legal systems (albeit while paying a special tax to the governing Muslims for the privilege).
In Scheffer's modern example: "Multiculturalism should lead, when you take it seriously, to legal pluralism."
That's precisely the kind of compartmentalized society that Canadians and Europeans both hope to avoid.
As Phillips told his British audience earlier this month, social cohesion is based on three elements: Equality; interaction; and participation.
"This is what we mean when we speak of integration," said, "not some mealy-mouthed process where new migrants are told to leave their identities behind."
