When Archbishop Rowan Williams proposed that British courts should use Islamic sharia law for family matters among Muslim citizens, he met with a just uproar of denunciation.

Williams was not concerned only with extending the role of sharia law amongst Muslims in British society. He wants — and he said so clearly — to increase the role of all the different religions, in British society, and not least the one at whose head he stands.

Williams’ ostensible chief rival, the Catholic Cardinal, Cormac Murphy O’Connor, rushed in to defend him. It is yet another example of the pattern which we have commented upon in Solidarity more than once: the different religious sects tacitly collaborating to use each others’ demands to boost the overall role of religion in society. They support each other — for now.

The militancy of one religion in its own cause spurs on and encourages the others to militancy in theirs. All of them work to subordinate society to organised superstition. The experience of Canada, where, in Ontario, similar moves to what Williams advocates were defeated by a big campaign, is of interest here.

A report by Ontario’s former attorney general Marion Boyd had recommended the use of Islamic law to settle issues such as divorce and child custody. Ontario had allowed Catholic and Jewish faith-based tribunals to resolve family disputes on a voluntary basis since 1991.

After prolonged protests, the government backed down. In February 2006 the Ontario government announced that: “Under [new] legislation, resolutions based on other laws and principles — including religious principles — will have no legal effect and will not be enforceable by the courts”. Not only was the proposal to import sharia law rejected: the previous concessions to Jewish and Catholic religious law were rescinded.

Attorney General Michael Bryant said: “when it comes to family law arbitrations in this province, there is only one law and that is Canadian law.”

The point, of course, is not that the law should be “Canadian” — or “British” — but that it should be secular and should guarantee equal rights to all women, regardless of religious background.

The campaign against Sharia law was led by left activists of Iraqi and Iranian background. Homa Arjomand, coordinator of the International Campaign Against Sharia Courts in Canada, said:

“Once again I want to thank all the people who worked on the campaign. This victory was the result of the hard work of thousands of activists, across Ontario, Canada and Europe who volunteered their time and skills to help bring an end to faith-based arbitration and Sharia courts in Canada. To each and everyone of them I want to say thank you, we did this together. This is a great achievement for the women’s rights movement.

“We started with a handful of supporters and grew to a coalition of over a thousand volunteers and activists…together we defeated the forces of ‘Political Islam’ in Ontario, but this is just the first step... My concern now is to prevent religious arbitration from continuing underground and to assist women and children to get the full benefit of Canadian law when settling family legal matters”.

The same activists have since then campaigned against a proposal by the Ontario Conservative opposition leader John Tory that “taxpayers should fund Islamic, Hindu, Jewish and other faith-based schools just like public and Catholic ones”. Their slogan has been: “One secular school system for all”.