The Trouble with Islam : A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith

An Unlikely Promoter of an Islamic Reformation
The New York Times October 4, 2003 CLIFFORD KRAUSS

TORONTO — As a Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji never eats pork, never drinks alcohol and regularly reads the Koran. Otherwise she is Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare.

At 35, Ms. Manji, a lesbian intellectual with spiky hair and a sharp tongue, is an outspoken television journalist who admires Israel and applauds the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein. More than that, she has issued a searing critique of her religion in a new book, "The Trouble with Islam" (Random House Canada), calling for radical change.

While every religion has its fundamentalists, she notes, "only in Islam is literalism in the mainstream," a recipe for generating hatreds that can spawn suicide bombers.

There are other Islamic liberals who say the Sept. 11 attackers did more than hijack four planes: they hijacked an entire religion. Ms. Manji goes much further, saying that Islam has deep-rooted problems with Jews, women, slavery and authoritarianism that go back centuries. Her goal is a thoroughly liberal reform, started by Muslims living in the West.

"If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now," she argues in her book. "If we're sincere about fighting the asphyxiating despotism" that Al Qaeda seeks to spread, she adds, "we can't be afraid to ask: What if the Koran isn't perfect? What if it's not a completely God-authored book? What if it's riddled with human biases?"

As a longtime broadcaster and public affairs talk-show host on Canadian television, Ms. Manji, prominent, articulate and telegenic, with a rapid-fire delivery, has a ready platform for her ideas.

These ideas have already set off a searching debate. In the first weeks after publication of her book, she has made front-page news across Canada and received immediate attention in Germany, where the book was also released. In the next few months the book will reach the United States (St. Martin's Press), Australia, other parts of Europe and most probably Israel.

The book has also provoked death threats.

She takes no chances. Conversing in her Toronto living room, fidgeting, with a cup of spicy Indian tea in hand, Ms. Manji gushes with arguments as a hefty bodyguard stands on the porch. She has put bulletproof glass in some windows. She insists that her house not be described in detail to avoid giving a hint of where she lives.

Her central call is for Muslims to join her in critical thinking.

"If Mohamed Atta, who was well educated in Germany, had grown up with questions rather than just glib answers," she said, "maybe then he would have stepped back before immolating himself and committing mass murder" on Sept. 11, 2001, in the attacks that he helped organize.

As much as anything, she emphasizes, her thirst is for inquiry, something she says she admires in Israeli society. The goal is to "create conversations where they have never occurred before."

It is working. The immediate reply is as fiery as her own high-octane critique.

"The book title should be `The Trouble with Irshad Manji,' " said Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, dismissing her as a "media darling."

"She calls herself a good Muslim even though she is a lesbian and a feminist," he added. "She will have a shadow over her interpretation."

Written in essay form as a conversational letter to "my fellow Muslims," Ms. Manji tells of her "personal clash of civilizations," beginning with her family's flight to Canada in 1972 from her native Uganda when Idi Amin expelled the local East Indian community.

She comes from an upper-middle-class family (her father and brothers ran a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Uganda), but also a troubled home in which her father once chased her with a knife.

A questioning child, she had repeated run-ins with the teacher of her Islamic school in a Vancouver suburb. She finally became so disgusted with his anti-Semitic rants, she wrote, that she bolted from the class.

From that adolescent confrontation came more profound questions that have grown in urgency to the point where she admits being on the verge of giving up on Islam. But she hopes her doubts can help fuel a reform that in turn will bolster her faith and propel Islamic reform.

The Islam she desires, she says, is akin to the one in which dissent flourished in the 10th through 13th centuries, when "poets caricatured religion with court approval," and Jews and Muslims lived peacefully together in prosperity and cross-fertilized their cultures.

Indeed Ms. Manji is a product of the expanding diversity encouraged by Canada's immigration policy. About 600,000 Muslims now live in Canada, nearly half 24 years old or younger, according to the 2001 census. "There is a hunger among younger Muslims for debate and discussion," she said.

Living in a free society like Canada's has allowed Ms. Manji to raise questions and form her own understanding of Islam, she says. But even as she applauds Canadian tolerance, she is critical of liberals who are not tough enough on fundamentalism. She voices concern that some Islamic schools in Canada are spreading a brand of intolerant Islam, taught in parts of the Middle East and Asia, that could breed terrorism here as well.

But if Islam presents a special challenge to the West, Ms. Manji argues, Western liberalism can also challenge and change Islam. She says that young Muslims living in the West are bound to push for more diverse expressions of the religion. "It is imperative that somehow, some way, people begin to understand that the West and Islam are not mutually exclusive," she said.

A freer trade in ideas, she suggests, can be encouraged by investment in small loans to women living in Muslim countries to help them break from male domination.

"When I see a woman in Nigeria getting sentenced to 180 lashes for premarital sex, despite the fact that she's produced several witnesses confirming that she was raped, it is my responsibility as a Muslim to speak out," she said.

While her critics take special offense at her suggestion that the Koran itself may be flawed, she does not exclude herself from the possibility as well. Only God knows the truth, she said.

"If I am wrong," she smiled, "I will pay a price on the day of judgment."

Rousing Islam

Some weeks ago, Irshad Manji suggested to her downstairs tenant that it might be a good idea if she packed up and left. There was no problem -- the suggestion was merely precautionary. Manji, a high-profile, secular, gay Muslim writer and broadcaster, explained that she had a new book coming out, that its contents were provocative and that it might well elicit some sort of reprisal.

Provocative?

Incendiary is more like it. The book -- The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty andChange (Random House) -- may well become to non-fiction what Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was to fiction. Not just explosive but, in all likelihood, in the eyes of Muslim fundamentalists from Tehran to Jakarta, blasphemous.

Rushdie, you will remember, had a formal fatwa issued against him -- an Islamic death warrant, pronounced by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie's crime: a fictional presentation of the prophet Mohammed that devout Muslims interpreted as less than flattering. He spent the next eight years in hiding.

Manji, though not nearly as well known, has gone even further -- and she's doing it without the modestly protective cover of literary fiction.

In a breezy conversational tone that disguises the revolutionary nature of her ideas, if not the intellectual rigour of her argument, the 35-year-old first documents and then challenges her faith to rid itself of what she sees as anti-Semitism, antifeminism, slavery and homophobia. Worse, from the vantage point of fundamentalist Islam, she dares to question the assumed perfection of the Koran itself.

The Islamic holy book, she writes, "is not transparently egalitarian for women. It's not transparently anything except enigmatic. . . . It's Muslims who manufacture consent in Allah's name. The decisions we make on the basis of the Koran aren't dictated by God; we make them of our own human free will."

The Koran's insistence on absolute submission, she further maintains, is an express train to "brain-dead."

Not for nothing is her Web site labelled muslim-refusenik.com. The Web site's address is, in part, a misnomer, because Manji isn't refusing Islam outright; she's spent years reading the Koran and the more interpretive commentaries called hadiths and considers herself a devout Muslim, within her own terms.

"I'm not asking Muslims to do something outside of our tradition," she insists. "Just the opposite: I'm trying to help revive ijtihad, Islam's lost tradition of independent thinking. And this opportunity to rediscover ijtihad is especially available to Muslims in the West, because it's here that we already enjoy precious freedoms to challenge and be challenged, without fear of state reprisal. What I'm trying to do is promote tolerance. To get there, I and a critical mass of my fellow Muslims need to confront the intolerance that's percolating in our own ranks."

State reprisal, certainly. But reprisal by Muslim authorities or some determined fundamentalist is another matter. They're apt to find iconoclasm on just about every page of The Trouble With Islam.

It's not surprising, then, that virtually every Islamic scholar or police agency consulted in advance concluded that Manji was either a very brave or a very foolish woman -- the threat of violent backlash, they all agreed, was real.

Or, as her mother used to admonish her, "Irshad, you have lots of intelligence, but no common sense."

Not surprising, either, that the book's publisher, Random House, in July asked the federal Solicitor-General, Wayne Easter, to grant international protected person status to Manji. His department denied that request, arguing that it can only provide such security to non-Canadians at risk in Canada. But there's no doubt that the RCMP as well as local police officials in Toronto are maintaining a watching brief on her case.

Manji, of course, is acutely aware of the danger -- she's had bullet-resistant glass installed in the windows of her home. She knows that Muslim extremists not only hounded Rushdie, but exacted revenge for the perceived sins of Egypt's Nobel laureate novelist Naguib Mahfouz -- 30 years after a book they regarded as heretical appeared -- by stabbing him in the neck.

Were her book only appearing in Canada, it's possible the storm would pass quickly. But The Trouble With Islam has already been published in Germany and will appear in the United States, Australia, Britain, France and the Netherlands next year. It may also appear in Hebrew and Arabic, courtesy of an Israeli publisher.

As Manji sees it, extremists have seized control of Islam because "we moderates have turned our back on independent thinking and let them." And that control, she's convinced, is being exercised not only in the mosques and madrassas of Pakistan, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria and other centres of Muslim culture, but among diaspora Muslim communities in North America as well. She recently found herself on a university campus and overheard a young, articulate imam preaching to a roomful of acolytes. "He was shouting . . ., 'the Jihad begins right here -- this is your responsibility!' " Manji recalls.

Literal interpretation of the Koran is now so deeply embedded in the Muslim mindset, she maintains, that even reform-minded disciples "have no clue how to debate or challenge." To do so is to invite being labelled a kafir or infidel -- as Manji already has been in denunciatory e-mails.

To some extent, she is inured to the abuse. Immigrating with her family from Uganda when she was 8, Manji grew up in Richmond, B.C., in what she calls an "incredibly violent household," dominated by her father's black, occasionally knife-wielding moods. Demonstrating a precocious sense of self and ability, she early on determined that education would be her passport "out of insularity and tribalism." A scholarship student, the first humanities scholar to win UBC's Governor-General's Medal for top graduate, she practised her public-speaking abilities by interviewing herself in front of a mirror, and strengthened her muscles -- needed to respond to racist taunts from classmates -- by lugging volumes of an encyclopedia in her knapsack.

Before she was 30, Manji had written editorials for The Ottawa Citizen, hosted a public-affairs show on Vision TV, debated hot-button issues on TVOntario and written her first book, Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New Democracy. Ms. Magazine called her a "Feminist for the 21st Century;" Maclean's chose her as one of its 100 "Leaders for Tomorrow." More recently, she's been a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto's Hart House, host of TVOntario's Big Ideas, and president of something called VERB TV, a channel (still in development) for young people. The idea for The Trouble With Islam emerged from a post-9/11 column she wrote for The Globe and Mail, in which she called on Muslims to "defend the very pluralism that makes it possible for us to be here in the first place."

Despite the undeniable risks, Manji is intrepid, if not fearless. "It may sound corny to a non-immigrant," she said over coffee one morning last week, "but we immigrants totally understand that what we have here in the West is precious. And I don't mean material goods -- I mean freedom. There is something I've got here as a Muslim woman that I probably couldn't expect in too many other places. I've been using it since I was a kid and damn it, I'm not going to stop now. I have a very thick skin, a pretty big brain and, I will be the first to admit, an even bigger mouth. I don't pretend to have all the answers. But thank God, yours and mine, that in this part of the world it is not only a right to ask questions -- it is right to ask questions."

Muslim author urges reform
Tells faithful to `take responsibility' for what ails Islam-Cancelled as speaker because of fears she'd offend too many

Sep. 17, 2003. 01:00 AM

LESLIE SCRIVENER
FAITH AND ETHICS REPORTER

Call her crazy or call her courageous, Toronto journalist Irshad Manji is calling for reform in Islam — targetting what she calls its oppression of women, its tribalism and its attitudes toward Jews.

In a book published yesterday, Manji questions the divine authorship of the Qu'ran and urges Muslims to freely ask questions about Islam and adopt the ages old tradition of independent reasoning.

"Grow up! And take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam," she said in an interview.

The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up call for Honesty and Change is beyond controversial. It may ignite a firestorm of protest.

She isn't the first to call for a reformation in Islam. There are stirrings of it in other places, but her easy conversational style, addressed to "my fellow Muslims," makes it accessible to a wide range of readers.

"Muslims have been bludgeoning each other's freedoms well before European colonialism, well before the state of Israel and well before MTV," she said. "You can't blame intellectual stagnation or complacency on the White House, the Jews, even the house of Saud. We have only ourselves to blame."

Manji, 34, said she received as many supportive responses, especially from young Muslims, as angry ones.

"Muslims need to change their anti-Semitic and anti-female and other bad habits," said a reader who had fled Afghanistan.

Critical letter writers have accused her of propagating lies and being in the pay of Zionists.

"Will we remain spiritually infantile, shackled by expectations to clam up and conform, or will we mature into citizens, defending the very pluralism of interpretations and ideas that makes it possible to practice Islam in this part of the world?" she writes.

Manji is a practising Muslim who observes the month-long fast at Ramadan and prays daily, though no longer in the proscribed times and style mandated by the faith. "When it becomes rote, a ritual, it easily translates into submissiveness. Discipline is one thing, but when it becomes mindless — am I truly conscious of communicating with my Creator?" she writes.

Yet some readers will not see her criticism of Islam as an act of love. Though she hasn't been the target of a fatwa — as Salman Rushdie was for his fictional The Satanic Verses — she does have a sleek, imposing-looking man wearing black with her when she goes out. He's a "personal assistant,"not a bodyguard, she insists. They've known each another for years. He checks the board room at her publisher's before a conversation begins. He looks around as she walks to a park to have her photo taken.

She has had bullet proof glass installed in some rooms in her house. Better safe than sorry, she said. And she's been consulting with the police on security measures, though she has not received any threats she considers serious.

At least one multicultural organization has cancelled her as a speaker because they're afraid she'll offend Muslims.

The ideas in the book have evolved over her lifetime, but became more urgent after 9/11, when she read of Muslim suicide bombers leaving death notes citing the Qu'ran and the joys that awaited them in the afterlife.

Manji, with spiked and streaked hair and her intense way of locking eyes in conversation, is startlingly direct. She has never hidden the fact that she's gay. After years in broadcasting — her latest program is Big Ideas on TVO — she answers questions quickly and fluently.

She is astonished by how people in the west, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, practise a form of self -censorship when it comes to critiquing Muslim issues.

"What I am about to say may sound wrong, out of context, but Osama bin Laden had it right on one score — we are spoiled in this society, we have gone soft. As the philosopher Arthur Koestler said, the problem is that we have ceased to be aware of the values we are in danger of losing — freedom of expression, freedom of assembly. They are taken for granted as magical, as a birthright, but we immigrants can tell you, you need to exercise these freedoms every day lest they atrophy.

"Bin Laden is counting on this, on non-Muslims being cowed by fear of being called racist. It's as if they feel they are doing us a favour by refusing to have faith in us Muslims to push for reform, as someone called it, the soft racism of low expectations.

"However, I believe we can transcend this moment."

She urges Muslim readers to adopt the Islamic tradition of ijtihad, which allows Muslims to update his or her religious practises in light of contemporary circumstances. She proposes a movement to encourage women entrepreneurs. Then, she writes, priorities will change: "from tribalism to trade, from the honour of husbands as sole providers to the dignity of reciprocity between men and women."

Manji's family fled Ugandan dictator Idi Amin's regime in 1971. She said her free-spirited questioning of convention started at an early age at a babysitting service offered by the Rose of Sharon Baptist Church, where at age eight she received the Most Promising Christian of the Year award.

She attended Saturday afternoon classes in Islam until she was 14, when she was kicked out. At 23, she was an editorial writer for the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. She has debated current events regularly on TVO and hosted CITY-TV's QueerTelevision. Ms. magazine called her a "Feminist for the 21st Century" and Maclean's named her a "Leader for Tomorrow."
(source)

Socrates: "I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can...And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same...I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict."

Thomas Paine: "It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."

Martin Luther King: "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

The ethics and actions of a BRIGHT are based on a naturalistic worldview
http://www.the-brights.net/

return to top of this page