The Trouble with Islam
Irshad Manji
http://www.muslim-refusenik.com/home.html
I
t's an open letterhttp://www.muslim-refusenik.com/the_book_index.html
The Trouble with Islam
is an open letter from me, a Muslim voice of reform, to concerned citizens worldwide -- Muslim and not. It's about why my faith community needs to come to terms with the diversity of ideas, beliefs and people in our universe, and why non-Muslims have a pivotal role in helping us get there.The themes I'm exploring with the utmost honesty include:
- the inferior treatment of women in Islam;
- the Jew-bashing that so many Muslims persistently engage in; and
- the continuing scourge of slavery in countries ruled by Islamic regimes.
I appreciate that every faith has its share of literalists. Christians have their Evangelicals. Jews have the ultra-Orthodox. For God's sake, even Buddhists have fundamentalists.
But what this book hammers home is that only in Islam is literalism is mainstream. Which means that when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims have no clue how to dissent, debate, revise or reform.
The Trouble with Islam
shatters our silence. It shows Muslims how we can re-discover Islam's lost tradition of independent thinking -- a tradition known as "ijtihad" -- and re-discover it precisely to update Islam for the 21st century. The opportunity to update is especially available to Muslims in the West, because it's here that we enjoy precious freedoms to think, express, challenge and be challenged without fear of state reprisal. In that sense, the Islamic reformation begins in the West.It doesn't, however, end here. Not by a long shot. People throughout the Islamic world need to know of their God-given right to think for themselves. So The Trouble with Islam outlines a global campaign to promote innovative approaches to Islam. I call this non-military campaign "Operation Ijtihad." In turn, the West's support of this campaign will fortify national security, making Operation Ijtihad a priority for all of us who wish to live fatwa-free lives.
That's the book. The question now becomes: What possessed me to write it? Once I tell you a little about me, I think you'll see where my own passion comes from.
Why I'm struggling with Islam
As refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda, my family and I settled just outside of Vancouver in 1972. I grew up attending two types of schools: the secular public school of most North American kids and then, for several hours at a stretch every Saturday, the Islamic religious school (madressa).
I couldn't quite reconcile the open and tolerant world of my public school with the rigid and bigoted world inside my madressa. But I had enough faith to ask questions -- plenty of them.
My first question for my madressa teacher was, "Why can't girls lead prayer?" I graduated to asking more nuanced questions, such as, "If the Koran came to Prophet Muhammad as a message of peace, why did he command his army to kill an entire Jewish tribe?"
You can imagine that such questions irritated the hell out of my madressa teacher, who routinely put down women and trashed the Jews. He and I reached the ultimate impasse over yet another question: "Where," I asked, "is the evidence of the 'Jewish conspiracy' against Islam? You love to talk about it, but what's the proof?" That question, posed at the age of 14, got me booted out of the madressa.
Permanently.
At this point, I had a choice to make: I could walk away from my Muslim faith and get on with being my "emancipated" North American self, or I could give Islam another chance. Out of fairness to the faith, I gave Islam another chance. And another. And another. For the past 20 years, I've been educating myself about Islam. As a result, I've discovered a progressive side of my religion -- in theory.
But I remain a hugely ambivalent Muslim because of what's happening "on the ground" -- massive human rights violations, particularly against women and religious minorities -- in the name of Allah.
Liberal Muslims say that what I'm describing isn't "true" Islam. But these Muslims should own up to something: Prophet Muhammad himself said that religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others. By that standard, how Muslims actually behave is Islam, and to sweep that reality under the rug of theory is to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our fellow human beings.
That's why I'm struggling. That's why I'm passionate. And that leads me to what I consider to be the trouble with Islam.
The trouble with Islam is...
As I see it, the trouble with Islam is that individual lives are too small and the lies we tell to excuse that fact are too big. Neither has to be the case under a compassionate and merciful God, as Muslims like to describe Allah. The Trouble with Islam, then, is a plea for all of us, as citizens of the world, to help Islam fulfill its glorious humanitarian potential, so that we all gain in diversity, dignity and security.
At the beginning of my book, I call myself a "Muslim Refusenik". That doesn't mean I refuse to be a Muslim; it means that I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of God.
In that spirit, I'm asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place?
My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?
The Trouble with Islam is a wake-up call for honesty and change on everybody's part. Through the book and this website, let's create conversations where none existed before.
� Irshad Manji 2003
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Rousing Islam
Irshad Manji's new book, The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change, could make her non-fiction's Salman Rushdie, MICHAEL POSNER writes
By MICHAEL POSNER
UPDATED AT 7:50 PM EST
Tuesday, Sep. 16, 2003
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030916/IRSHAD16/Entertainment/Idx
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."
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