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The new culture wars

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 21, 2007

Today’s Sunday Times quotes me, among others, to analyze the “new culture wars” — the moral confusion that arises when multiculturalism calcifies into a dogmatic religion.

Example: How can Queers for Palestine ignore the fact that to be openly gay in the Palestinian territories is to to invite serious homophobic hostility? I’d support any movement of “Queers for Liberation,” since the title would suggest liberation from Islamist colonizers as much as from Israeli occupiers. But that’s not the logic of Queers for Palestine.

Moreover, how can feminists stay quiet about the abuse of women under most forms of Sharia law? If feminists view patriarchy as global, then differences in culture shouldn’t compel us to hit the mental mute button whenever Muslim men start speaking.

That’s the moral confusion of the new culture wars.

Happily, however, reason still has a fighting chance. The silence of Western feminists is being challenged — by Western feminists themselves.

This month, Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Democrat in the US House of Representatives, introduced legislation to condemn honor killings and other forms of cultural terrorism against women. Better still, publicly supporting her is none other than the National Organization for Women (NOW), the American feminist lobby.

Why is that news? Because right-wing media regularly criticize NOW for dismissing the plight of Muslim women. Well, mainstream US feminists have “officially” spoken — yet I don’t recall seeing any of them on television lately.

Where are the conservative talk show hosts NOW?

Frankly, they should be clamoring to book the president of NOW, Kim Gandy. Here are key quotes from her statement in support of Rep. Jackson-Lee’s brave measure, known as House Resolution 32:

• The United States must call strongly for the protection of the millions of women who will become victims of stoning, stabbing, maiming, forced suicide, beheadings, acid throwing and many other cruel punishments with the false justification of “family honor.”
• H. Res. 32 begins an essential process to engage other nations in a dialogue about the treatment of women within their borders [highlighting mine].

• The world’s leaders must stand up for women who have no voice. NOW has made a commitment to help in the global effort to rid of this oppression against women.

With straight talk like this, you’d think Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Tammy Bruce, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others would be scrambling to have Kim Gandy on their programs. Why haven’t their producers phoned? Or have they — only to find that NOW is hiding? I don’t know the answer.

What I do know is this: NOW needs to reveal that a few years ago it tried to organize a press conference about defending Muslim women from the excesses of Islamist power. That press conference never happened because, ironically, the American media’s obsession with national security made “other” Islamic issues irrelevant.

But women’s rights abroad aren’t divorced from security at home. September 11 taught us that the entire world is our backyard. The Taliban began by attacking Afghani women and, with our indifference, went on to help Bin Laden’s minions execute their assaults on 3,000-plus workers in New York City.

The lesson: What happens to some of us thousands of miles away can wind up affecting each of us.

If you believe, as I do, that every creature on God’s green Earth is entitled to a basic set of dignities, then human rights are universal. And that suggests it’s everybody’s business to protect human rights, even when we’re told that different cultures do things in different ways.

Let me draw an ultra-important distinction: Although human beings are born equal, cultures are not. Cultures aren’t born at all; they’re constructed. Human-made. More often, man-made. Which means there’s nothing sacred about them.

In turn, that means there’s nothing blasphemous about reforming the most malignant aspects of cultures, including crimes committed under the custom of honor.

To the feminists of NOW, I, as a Muslim woman, say simply: You go, girls!

And to the orthodox multiculturalists who insist that “white women” have no right to pronounce on the lives of Muslim women, deal with this: Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee is an African-American from Texas. She knows racists.

I dare you to declare her one.

Imagine a stadium full of students…

Posted in On The Road, Announcements on Oct 18, 2007

… and they’re not drunk on anything but their capacity to change the world for good.

Sound like a Christian rock concert or a visit from the Pope? Well, maybe we progressives should learn a thing or two from the religious types.

I’m happy to report that we are learning. On Friday, I and other evangelists for human rights will speak to thousands of Toronto students and teachers about transforming our society. The event is called “Me to We” and you can watch it - LIVE - on MTV online starting at 9 am Eastern time.

The line-up of speakers includes Romeo Dallaire, former head of peacekeeping forces in Rwanda. He repeatedly warned the United Nations about an impending genocide. Under Secretary General Kofi Annan, the UN ignored him. But that didn’t stop Dallaire’s mission of compassion. He’ll be on around 10:30 EST.

With Betty at “Students Effecting Change” conference

As for me, I’ll go on at about 12:50 pm EST. My theme? Tune in and find out! You can grab a hint - but it’s only a hint - by reading the Toronto Star.

By the way, I’m taking a red-eye flight to Toronto so I can arrive at the event on time. The reason I care so deeply is that I’m moved by students like this, who recently wrote to me:

im a 14 year old girl and i find everything you do and have done with your studies amazing. you will be speaking on october 19 at me to we day and i greatly look forward to it. i also have your book the trouble with islam today and im constantly reviewing it. i am serbian croation and bosnian and my backgrounds fight like there is no tomorrow about stupid issues. i love the fact that you are out-spoken. - andrea

She’s a powerhouse of leadership potential. I, for one, will do everything I can so that percolating potential becomes kinetic energy.

Dalai Lama offends China - should the world compromise?

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 17, 2007

I love the idea of global interdependence. It’s long been my belief that our challenge today is not to decide who owns what identity but to decide what we all owe each other.

That’s why, as a best-selling author who lives in an open society, I’ve used my privileges to post free translations of my book on this website for those who don’t have access to it because of censorship.

But interdependence is not a panacea. It generates problems of its own. Put simply, the more interdependent countries are, the more offense they take at statements about the need for human rights.

Case in point: China’s reaction to the fact the Dalai Lama has just received the Congressional Gold Medal. Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader couldn’t have been more humble or conciliatory in his acceptance speech — but that’s not going to stop China from threatening retaliation.

Hints abound that Beijing will undermine US-EU efforts to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Or that it will sabotage peace talks in Darfur. (Like we could ever count on Chinese leaders to support real peace in oil-rich Sudan. Please.)

As I write this, another case of offense is Turkey’s response to the Armenian genocide bill introduced in the US Congress. Turkey has lobbied feverishly against American legislation that declares the early 20th-century slaughter of Armenians to be a genocide.

More than merely protest with words, Turkey is promising to block its borders to US war planners, who desperately need Ankara onboard so they can move troops and equipment in and out of Iraq.

Not only has the Bush administration sided with Turkey (surprise!), but key Democrats in Congress are also withdrawing their support for the anti-genocide bill. “Too inflammatory to the Muslim world at this fragile time,” they now say. Odd. These same lawmakers didn’t think so a week ago. What changed?

Nothing more than Turkey’s outrage — and in an interdependent world, that translates into the need for self-censorship for the sake of conserving your allies.

Normally, I’d understand the strategic value of restraint. But on matters of basic human rights, no way. A genocide is a genocide is a genocide. End of story.

President Bush didn’t let China’s fuming stop him from attending today’s ceremony for the Dalai Lama. Why, then, should Democrats be bullied into conformity by furious Turkey or an enfeebled White House? I know: Iraq. But as House speaker Nancy Pelosi has argued on ABC News, “Some of what harms our troops relate to values — Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, torture. Our troops are well-served when we declare who we are as a country, and we declare it to the rest of the world.”

Global interdependence is great. Until it becomes an excuse for cow-towing to cowards.

Nobel committee’s brilliant choice, and I don’t mean Gore

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 15, 2007

I mean Doris Lessing, winner of the latest Nobel prize in literature. What makes Lessing such a compelling writer is that she’s an exemplar of moral courage — the willingness to break silences within your own community for the sake of a greater good.

A Londoner born in Persia and raised in Southern Rhodesia, Lessing once gave a series of lectures in my city of Toronto. Later published under the provocative title Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, those lectures turned me on to the force of her thinking.

Notice the word “choose” in her title. We’re not mere victims of our past, Lessing insists. We have the option - each of us - to be informed by cultural, ethnic, creedal and religious traditions without being bullied by them.

And who is “we?” That’s the beauty of Lessing. She refuses to play favorites. Women and men, whites and blacks, oppressors and self-styled liberators must be held to the same standard of conduct. Otherwise, justice has no integrity.

Let me illustrate by quoting directly from Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. First, she takes on the thought-police of her own “white” tribe:

I was brought up in a country where a small white minority dominated a black majority. In old Southern Rhodesia the white attitudes towards the blacks were extreme: prejudiced, ugly, ignorant. More to the point, these attitudes were assumed to be unchallengeable and unalterable, though the merest glance at history would have told them (and many of them were educated people) that it was inevitable their rule would pass, that their certitudes were temporary.

But it was not permissible for any member of this white minority to disagree with them. Anybody who did faced immediate ostracism; they had to change their minds, shut up, or get out. While the white regime lasted - ninety years, which is nothing in historical terms - a dissident was a heretic and traitor.

Typical authoritarianism of the Right, right? Lessing then exposes the same abusive traits on the Left:

A few months after the start of the miners’ strike in Britain, in 1984, just when it was moving into its second, more violent phase, a miner’s wife came on television to tell her story. Her husband had been on strike for months and they had no money. While he supported the union, and agreed there should have been a strike, he thought [union leader] Arthur Scargill had led the strike badly. Along with a minority, he had gone back to work.

A gang of miners had broken this couple’s windows, smashed up the inside of their house, and beaten the man. The woman said she knew who these men were. They were friends. She could not believe that decent folk could have done such a thing.

Ah, writes Lessing, but welcome to our eminently human impulse for dividing the world between us and them. Not only will supposed friends turn on you when the pack demands it, but you should expect them to. She warns:

If you are a member of a close-knit community, you know you differ from this community’s ideas at the risk of being seen as a no-goodnik, a criminal, an evil-doer. This is an absolutely automatic process; nearly everyone in such situations behaves automatically.

So where’s hope? Exactly with the “no-goodniks, the criminals, the evil-doers.” That is, with the handful of heretics who engage in self-criticism. I’m highlighting her words for good measure:

There is always the minority who do not behave automatically, and it seems to me that our future, the future of everybody, depends on this minority. We should be thinking of ways to educate our children to strengthen this minority and not, as we mostly do now, to revere the pack.

Music to my reformist Muslim ears! Teaching the need for moral courage - the choice to become a smeared minority , to transcend tribalism, to prefer the common good - is exactly what I’ll soon be doing at New York University.

If you want to know more about the Moral Courage Project that I’ll be initiating and directing, go the GET UPDATES box on the right-hand side of this page and join my confidential mailing list.

A final note: The New York Times recently re-printed a 1992 op-ed by Lessing in which she skewers political correctness not just among anti-communists, but also among anti-racists and feminists.

That’s who the Nobel committee chose as this year’s winner in literature. Proof, perhaps, that there is a God.

Happy Eid to the cartoonists of the world

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 13, 2007

At the end of Ramadhan, the Muslim month of fasting, my childhood memories have me dressing in a fine shalwar kameez, attending the mosque, comparing my crazy combo of colors to that of the other girls, and finally - oooh, mama - receiving a bowl of pudding in which foil-wrapped coins floated about. We kiddies could search for the bounty, consider ourselves rewarded for astronomical gastronomical sacrifice, and not resent the Catholics for their Easter egg hunts.

How we didn’t wind up choking on the coins, only Allah knows. Sorry Christopher Hitchens but God is, indeed, great.

Now, as an adult, what can I expect on Eid? Try a cartoon of myself, courtesy of a reader from the Philippines:

You can rest assured I won’t be starting a riot over this cartoon. Nor will I goad my many fans in al-Qaeda to put a bounty on the cartoonist’s head for suggesting that all Muslims sit improperly on our prayer rugs. In fact, I appreciate the depiction of me quietly reflecting.

If you’ve watched my documentary, Faith Without Fear, you know my mother would love this image too. “If only she would pray,” mother confides to camera about daughter, “I’d be such a happy mom.” But, ma, I do pray… just not the way you do.

Finally, the superfly — or super-fly-away — hair. That’s what transforms this cartoon into a caricature. Which makes me chuckle. It reminds me of the self-described moderate Muslim guy who wrote to say, “Irshad Manji, you lie so much about Islam that even your hair rises up in protest!” How do like it now, bro?

Eid Mubarak to one and all!

Critical thinking: a right (and duty) of all Muslims

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts, On The Road on Oct 11, 2007

Last night’s sold-out film screening at NYU drew a number of young Muslims who are genuinely struggling with Islam. One girl cried in my arms. Another wrote these words to me:

As a devout (but not extremist) Muslim myself, your documentary Faith Without Fear really touched me deeply. I think that it is important for Muslims who are frustrated/oppressed by extremist Islam to know that it is ok to follow the faith that is within their souls. Muslims need to know that instead of abandoning their faith or Allah, they can and should turn to ijtihad.

“Ijtihad” is Islam’s tradition of critical thinking, debate and dissent. To restore this progressive tradition to the practice of Islam, I and other reform-minded Muslims have launched Project Ijtihad.

Of course, our critics are loud and legion. They insist that ijtihad can only be exercised by “scholars.” In that case, they ought to read a scholarly paper written by Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, Ph.D.  To download the paper, click here, then go to the “Read and Learn” box at the right-hand side of the page.

Dr. Abd-Allah points out that ijtihad is a “duty of the first magnitude” for ordinary Muslims and not just for the elites. Throughout Islamic history, says Dr. Abd-Allah:

“… even the common people were required to perform their own type of ijtihad by striving to discern the competence of individual scholars and selecting the best to follow, a principle emphatically asserted by the majority of Sunni and Shi’i scholars and their schools.”

Today, he suggests, Muslims in North America are well-poised to revive ijtihad on behalf of Muslims everywhere:

“Like our counterparts in Canada, considerable sectors of the American Muslim community, in contrast to many of our co-religionists in the European Union, are highly educated and constitute, per capita, one of the most talented and prosperous Muslim communities in the world. Moreover, American Muslims, at least for the time being, enjoy a relatively favorable socio-political context with extensive freedoms and political enfranchisement. Few Muslims in the world today are in a more advantageous position to comprehend the essence of modernity and post-modernity and to formulate new directions for ijtihad in keeping with the best traditions of Islamic thought and the imperatives of an interconnected pluralistic world.”

I concluded last night’s event with a similar sentiment: We ijtihadists aren’t asking our fellow Muslims to import a foreign tradition or an alien virtue into the faith. We’re reminding Muslims that Islam itself once exhibited a tradition of indie thinking.

What in God’s name are we doing with that tradition now?

Tonight, Faith Without Fear at New York University

Posted in On The Road, Announcements on Oct 10, 2007

Note to New Yorkers: I’d love to see you tonight at NYU’s Cantor Film Center (36 East 8th Street). That’s where I’ll hold a screening and discussion about my PBS documentary Faith Without Fear.

We’ll watch the film from 7-8 pm, followed by my on-stage interview with the Wall Street Journal’s foreign affairs columnist, Bret Stephens. After grilling me, Bret will moderate questions from the audience. I’ll wrap the night by signing books and DVDs.

The event is co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for Global Affairs and the School of Continuing/Professional Studies’ Programs in Writing, Humanities and Arts. Seating is free but limited, so show up by 6:45 pm if you want a good space. Need more information? Here you go.

By the way, I’ll soon be joining NYU to initiate and direct “The Moral Courage Project.” To find out more, sign up to my confidential mailing list through the GET UPDATES box on the right-hand side of this page.

Faithful yet secular? Profile of me in La Presse

Posted in On The Road on Oct 09, 2007

A thoughtful piece (en francais) in one of Quebec’s most popular daily newspapers. The journalist, Rima Elkouri, explores with me the virtues and vices of multiculturalism, accommodation of minorities, universality of human rights… and the photo ain’t bad either.

Giving thanks is no heresy, you turkeys

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Oct 08, 2007

In Canada, it’s Thanksgiving Day. You’d think that all people of faith would welcome a semi-spiritual moment in the West’s calendar.

But how does one Toronto-area mosque reportedly recognize this most harmless, even honourable, of holidays? By telling Muslims that we’re kuffar if we participate in Thanksgiving greetings and dinners.

Apart from being mean-spirited and absurd, this decree is highly ironic. After all, etymologically speaking, “kuffar” refers to someone who’s ungrateful to God.

So think about it: If we express gratitude to God on Thanksgiving, we’re kuffar - ungrateful to God. Huh? How does that work?

As I said in a recent radio interview, teachings like these only feed off the ignorance of newly arrived Muslim communities. We should question our imams and civic leaders. I, for one, am grateful that I’ve taken the opportunity to educate myself, which is a privilege we enjoy in free societies.

Tonight, as I break my fast, I’ll be praying that more of us Muslims distinguish between education and indoctrination. Ameen and pass the gravy, please.

Censoring me - and Beyonce - in Malaysia

Posted in Q & A on Oct 06, 2007

More reader feedback about why my book is censored in Malaysia, an historically tolerant and pluralistic part of the Muslim world:

Beyonce Knowles (don’t smirk on this, please) has the same problem as you. She canceled her Malaysia concert for she wasn’t allowed to wear her skimpy stuff the way she usually does. What would we call a covered Beyonce, anyway?

She decided, instead, to perform in some neighboring countries (like Indonesia) where rules are not as stifling. She can perform as she likes there. The local promoter, Razlan Ahmad Razali, said: “Though Indonesia is also a Muslim country, it doesn’t have all these issues that we [Malaysians] have.”

What are these issues? According to some people, no matter how they call things democratic, Muslims are still intrinsically theocratic. A party favoring “Islamic values” cannot also favor democratic ones. Even if you speak of [Malaysian Prime Minister] Badawi as the umbrella you are trying to open, well, what would you expect? An old and rusty umbrella.

Contrary to that view, however, I believe that the Islams of today are more theocratic because of what Muslims are turning them into.  In the first place, Islam was established by Mohammed with feminist values pretty much the same with the contemporary ones. Nowadays, everything is turned upside down.

This is only to tell you that publishing one page of a book by you in Malaysia is out of the question. But I am praying for it. More power to you, dear lady.” - anonymous

I see some truth in what anonymous is saying.  My book is being formally published in Indonesia. Journalists and women’s rights activists are openly supporting it. No such developments in Malaysia. Not yet.

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