Islam's rebel who has kept the faith

If broadcaster and writer Irshad Manji were a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist or an atheist, she would certainly have won an audience, but probably a limited one.

Yet Manji, aged 35, is today internationally famous, and at the same time infamous, for a single reason. She is a Muslim.

It took 9/11 for the world to focus on what has been happening within Islam, as in some places it plunges back towards the 7th century.

Most Muslims are horrified by such events as 9/11, of course. But powerful and courageous denunciations of extremism, or critiques of the surge of tribal Arab cultural hegemony within the Muslim world, have been rare.

On Tuesday, yet another group of Iraqi killers claiming to be devout Muslims boasted after butchering a group of poor Buddhist labourers: We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalese.

While the Abu Ghraib jail humiliations have provoked endless soul-searching within the West, the world has looked in vain for an adequately convincing and effective rejection by mainstream Islam of the extremist culture that drives those who murdered the Nepalese.

Hence the immense power and attraction of Manji's book, which has sold 150,000 copies in North America alone. She was born in Uganda, from which her family was driven by Idi Amin in 1972, settling in Vancouver. She attended a public school on weekdays and a madrassah on Saturdays, where she began to question two major messages: that women are inferior and that Jews are treacherous. She was expelled from the madrassah at 14 for asking too many questions. That was one turning point in her life. The next followed soon after.

I could have walked away from Islam, as many do, and become a normal secular North American, and relapsed into me-too materialism or retail therapy, she told the Weekend AFR . But I asked why my faith should be punished for my teacher's shortcomings. So I took the trouble to study Islam on my own.

She does not attend a mosque, but she prays often more than the five times prescribed. She says she is a spiritual Muslim rather than a religious Muslim.

The fatwah against Salman Rushdie in 1988 provoked an avalanche of commentary on Islam, which she devoured.

She says: It was because of the freedoms I had in the West to research and exchange ideas and think about things, that I came to discover the tradition of critical debate that Islam once had.

If I had grown up in a Muslim country, I would probably have become an atheist in my heart out of disgust at the forced indoctrination.

Manji has not let her lesbianism stand in the way of her faith. She asks: How can the Koran at once denounce homosexuality and declare that Allah 'makes excellent everything He creates'?

She stresses: I am not asking others to accept my version of Islam. But Islam has a supremacy complex. And only in Islam is literalism worldwide.

But I am much more optimistic today, because of the amount of support, love, even affection I have received from Muslims around the world, particularly the young and women.

Her big challenge, and that of those who have applauded her, is to take this underground hunger for change and make it above ground. Just as Hirsi Ali has done in Holland. She was a Somali asylum seeker who has become a Dutch MP after 12 years in Holland and has denounced both traditional Islam as misogynist and incapable of self-criticism, and Dutch multiculturalism as born of misplaced guilt.

Manji says that the threat of physical violence against her supporters and their families, even in open societies suppresses reform. And most periods of Islamic reformation in the past have been devoted to taking adherents closer to tribal Arab life in Mohammed's time.

She says: We need to be afraid not of American imperialism but of Arab cultural imperialism, because only 13per cent of Muslims are Arabs. Why are we told that the only legitimate language with which to communicate with God is Arabic? Why face Mecca, the heartland of Arabia, to pray?

The Arabs from the beginning have grafted their culture onto the principles of the Koran. The whole culture of 'honour' applied to Muslim women requires them to sacrifice their individuality to maintain the prerogative of the men in their lives.

The debate within continental Europe, she says, has forced stark and even silly choices on Muslims, between an orthodoxy that is expressed by wearing the hijab and an atheistic materialism.

They have told me: 'We are driven into the arms of fundamentalists.' That's bullshit. Everyone has to take responsibility for the choices we take.