 Journalist: Islam’s problem is dogma Arkansas Online LITTLE ROCK — The problem with Islam today is that far too many Muslims have adopted an “uncritical, unthinking, unquestioning approach” to their faith, a Muslim journalist said Monday. That dogmatic approach is empowering Islam’s “radical fringe - the violent jihadists,”Irshad Manji told a standingroom-only crowd at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock. The New York Times has described Manji as “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare,” a phrase the spiky-haired, popculture-referencing lecturer takes as a compliment. She is a senior fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy and writes columns distributed by the New York Times Syndicate. She is also the author of The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith and has a documentary called Faith Without Fear,which is scheduled to air on PBS on April 19. As Manji describes it, Islam is neither inherently a religion of war nor has it simply been hijacked by extremists. Instead, she sees Islam’s trouble as one of literalism. “Faith is secure enough to handle questions,” she said. “Faith never needs to be threatened by questions. Dogma, on the other hand, is brittle and rigid and always needs to be threatened by questions.” She emphasized that every world religion has its share of literalists, from evangelical Christians to ultra-Orthodox Jews to even literalist Buddhists. “The difference I would argue is that only within Islam today is literalism mainstream worldwide,” she said. “Let me tell you what I mean by that rather loaded statement. We Muslims, even here in America, are taught [that] because the Koran, Islam’s holy book, was revealed after the Torah and the Bible, it is the final and therefore perfect manifestation of God’s will.” She said even moderate Muslims believe the Koran is “God 3.0 and none shall come after it.” That means Muslims are reluctant to question those who profusely quote the Koran - even those who do so while also encouraging suicide bombers, she said. But what is wrong with Islam can be fixed by what is right with Islam, Manji said. She seeks to revive the Muslim tradition of ijtihad, which she defines as “critical thinking.” “This word sounds uncomfortably like jihad to non-Arab ears, and in fact it comes from the same root, meaning ‘to struggle,’” she said. “But unlike a violent struggle, ijtihad is all about a struggling with the mind to comprehend the wider world.” Ijtihad flourished during what many Muslim scholars regard as Islam’s golden age from the eighth through 13th centuries (incidentally, the time when western Europe was undergoing the Middle Ages). At that time, she said, 135 schools of thinking flourished in the Muslim world, and Muslims built one of thefirst centers of higher learning, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Muslims made other contributions still enjoyed in the West, Manji said. They invented mocha coffee, developed the early guitar and even introduced intoSpanish the exclamation “Ole,” which derived from the word Allah. Manji argued that critical thinking - asking hard questions of oneself and one’s faith - will help not only combat what she described as the violent fringe of Islam but the inhibitions that help fuel terrorism. Manji’s family fled Idi Amin’s Uganda in 1972 and settled in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. There, she attended a secular, public school during the week and a religious school on Saturdays. She began questioning when her religious teacher said women were inferior to men and that Jews weren’t to be trusted. Such statements didn’t match the world as she encountered it in ethnically diverse suburban Vancouver. “I began to wonder: What if I am not being educated at my school? What if I am being indoctrinated?” Manji said. “It’s a crucial distinction, isn’t it? Education encourages critical thinking. Indoctrination squelches critical thinking. That question seeped into my skin, into my conscience and into my professional life.” Today, Manji still describes herself as “a faithful Muslim.” “I do have the choice to leave it, at least here in this part of the world,” she said. “But I believe in the faith precisely because I do believe Islam has the raw materials to be humane and thoughtful and peaceable.” And she said her ideas are catching on with many young Muslims around the world. She has free downloads of her book translated into Arabic, Urdu and Persian at her Web site at www.muslim <http://www.muslim> -refusenik.com. In only a year, she said she has had 200,000 downloads so far. But she said wealthy countries in the West and Middle East, such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, can help the spread of ijtihad by supporting such things as micro-credit for women entrepreneurs and other efforts to promote literacy. Joe O’Brien, who runs an international management consulting firm in Little Rock, said he has read many conflicting accounts in the press about whether Islam can peacefully coexist with other world religions. He said he found her comments optimistic. “It’s not that Islam is good or bad, but the way I see it, she said, ‘We’re immature,’” said O’Brien, who is not a Muslim. “We need nuance. Once we get more mature, we can coexist with other religions just as they have learned to exist with other religions.” |