November is Adoption Awareness Month.  Throughout the month, Children's Aid Societies across Ontario spread the message that every child deserves to have a forever family' in the hopes of encouraging more families to open their homes to children in care.

Nazima Khan, 34, and Riyad Khan, 35, married young in the hopes of starting a family early. Born and raised in Toronto to South Asian parents, Nazima works as a registered nurse in a labour and delivery ward and Riyad works as a teacher. They are the proud parents of three young children. There is very little that distinguishes them from your average Muslim Canadian professional family. Except that they adopted their children from the Children’s Aid Society (CAS).

Faisal Kutty of the Valparaiso University School of Law says that there is hope for compromise between Western legal systems and Islamic law regarding the adoption of children from Islamic countries...

Conventional wisdom ”” among both Muslims and non-Muslims ”” holds that adoption, as practiced in much of the Western world, is alien and prohibited by dictates of Islam. This, of course, ignores the sophistication and nuances of both Western law and Islamic dictates. Indeed, adoption rights activists have struggled to find ways around the difficulties this simple binary causes for some children and prospective adoptive parents. With the growth of the Muslim population in the West, there is now an increased urgency to tackle this issue as some Muslims wish to adopt children from jurisdictions governed by Islamic law.