A Muslim woman's 'Call for Reform'

"Islam is on very thin ice with me," she writes in "The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (St. Martin's Press). She says that while other religions also contend with fundamentalist extremism, Islam's is particularly acute.

Mixing accounts of public repression in Muslim countries with personal memoir (a gay woman, she touches on Islam's antigay animus), Manji, who spoke at Harvard last week, pins her hopes on ijtihad, which she says is a lost Islamic tradition of independent thinking.

You write, "Totalitarian impulses lurk in mainstream Islam." What do you mean?

Every faith has its share of literalists. But only in Islam is literalism mainstream. We Muslims, even in the West, are raised to believe that because the Koran comes after the Torah and the Bible chronologically, it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God's will, not given to the corruptions and inconsistencies that the other holy texts lend themselves to. This supremacy complex is dangerous. When abuse happens under the banner of my faith -- as it does under the banner of everybody's faith -- most Muslims, even those who have Ph.Ds, still have no clue how to debate, dissent, revise, or reform.

So when President Bush insists that Islamic fanatics have perverted a great religion, is he wrong?

He is naive. He is not on the surface wrong, because only a thin minority of Muslims engages in terror. What President Bush has yet to acknowledge is that even moderate Muslims have been far too complacent about how much influence the lunatic fringe has. Mainstream Muslims refuse to stand up and take on the terrorists. Why is it relatively easy to bring Muslims into the street to protest a proposed ban on [head scarves] and other religious symbols in France, but next to impossible to bring Muslims into the streets to protest suicide bombings, or the stonings of Muslim women, or that the Saudi police would not let several young women leave a burning building because they did not have their abayas on?

Isn't that [lack of protest] the result of despair born of repression and poverty, not Islam per se?

That argument does not address the fact that those who have the resources and financial protection with which to speak out do not. Let's acknowledge that this is a part of the world that is plummeting in GDP. But I was in Gaza recently, and I interviewed the political leader of Islamic Jihad. I asked him, what is the difference between suicide and martyrdom? Without hesitation, he replied that suicide is done out of despair, but most martyrs were very successful in their earthly lives. What drives many suicide bombers is not poverty, but something else. Maybe it is ideological excitement [or] the Koran's promises in the afterlife.

Terror is a choice. There are many people who would find themselves in a situation like [Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker Mohamed] Atta's who would not engage in this choice. Muslims here in the West are equally silent about the terror that is in our midst, and we have no excuses.

After Sept. 11 in the United States, Muslim leaders were quite vocal in condemning fanaticism.

I go as a journalist to a lot of mosques -- in the greater Toronto area, for example -- and the public relations campaign that imams and mullahs and political lobbyists have put on since 9/11 does not match, in most instances, what I hear behind closed doors. I heard two sentiments: Muslims in the West need to support the jihad, and there is a Jewish-led Western conspiracy against Islam. Am I saying that imams who have spoken of tolerance fall into that category? No. But I am asking, what are they doing to ensure a consensus within Muslims in North America that our human rights are so important that we will have freedom to speak and challenge the mainstream practices within the faith itself?

Within Christianity, there is [such] a debate. The Jerry Falwells and Franklin Grahams of this world may deny the validity of everybody else's interpretation of the Bible, but what they cannot deny is that there is a plethora of intellectual approaches to Christianity. We're not even at that point in Islam. We still hear our imams and mullahs tell us that this is the only way.

Might not your angry tone turn away people who otherwise would agree with you?

Possibly. I've been clear in public [speeches] that if I have been inaccurate or exaggerated, I apologize. But what I will not apologize for is my passion.

Rich Barlow can be reached at rbarlow.81@alum.dartmouth.org.