Awakening moderate Muslims

This brilliant and daring book erupts across the horizon at a propitious time. It is a highly instructive read, and brims with challenges for readers interested in religion and politics.

Irshad Manji, the witty and scholarly television host and debater par excellence, is only 35 years old. She is also a Muslim “handing on by my fingernails.”

Manji took a year as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto to marshall her facts about Islamic history and personalities, put them under the scrutiny of her Canadian-nurtured liberal and democratic habits of mind, and package it all in a short, dense manual of lively and pungent writing. The result: an energetic, straightforward essay shaped in the form of a letter to fellow Muslims, the inclusive pronoun “we” used throughout.

For Catholic liberals, now pussyfooting around deep problems of their own fundamentalism in theology and structure, the book is model of bravery and fine argument. It is also thoroughly charming. Manji’s breezy, personal voice infuses the text.

She honed her rapid-fire, slightly impatient style while debating elderly white patriarchs on TVO years ago, persuading her audience to her point of view while delighting them, which is what great teaching is. She demonstrates an impressive historical scholarship and a devastating wit in support of her thesis: that moderate Muslims have given the struggle over to the extremists, that the Koran is ambiguous and contradictory, not perfect and once-for-always; that totalitarian Arab countries, not the West, have betrayed the Palestinians, and that there is much weary evidence of both deep misogyny and anti-Semitism in Islam.

Any of these ideas might bring wrath on her head, even physical threat. But she aims to awaken moderate and cautious Muslims to their responsibility.

Manji is a Torontonian, born to well-to-do Ugandan Asians who fled Uganda ahead of the persecution by Idi Amin. Raised in Richmond, B.C., from the age of four in 1972, she flew through school on scholarships, endured a violent father and a protective mother, studied at the madrassa school above the mosque in Richmond, and read and absorbed the Koran at Saturday school from age nine to 14, when she was expelled for asking too many hard questions. She found her English-language Koran at a shopping centre in Richmond, and wondered why girls must undertake the duty to pray five times a day when boys can wait until 13. With the Internet, she says, “the intellectual risk-taker can finally exhale.”

The book fairly rocks with good stories. Manji was sent as a child to a Baptist Bible school. At age eight, she won the “Most Promising Christian of the Year” award and received the prize of 101 Bible Stories. “Thank God,” she says, that “I would grow up in a world where the Koran didn’t have to be my first and only book.”

President of her high school student council, she absorbed Western secular liberal values of self-expression, intellectual inquiry and a conviction that no topic is too sacred to be probed. She was, she insists, living by the same qualities that marked the golden age of Islam, 750-1250 C.E., when the first university in the world was established, minorities were protected, free will and rational thought valued and tolerance practised. She takes as her heroes the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and the Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd (Averroes). She praises the Sufis, “Muslim mystics who read the Koran allegorically rather than literally.”

Moses Znaimer of CITY TV once asked his friend Irshad how she could stay in Islam with its brutal repression of women. She had to find an answer.

“By screaming self-pity and by conspicuous silence, Muslims are conspiring against ourselves,” and “letting these guys (mullahs with fatwas) walk away with the show,” she says. While only 13 per cent of Muslims are Arab, Manji believes that the Islam of the majority has been hijacked by a fundamentalist “desert, tribal Islam,” coming from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Lebanon.

“My home,” she says, “is where my dignity lies. I identify as Muslim but I cannot sacrifice that to the other sacred part of my identity: thinker.” Even in Toronto, she has found there is a “cruel, crude Islam” which fires vitriolic volleys when she airs television programs about gay and lesbian Muslims.

Finally, she calls for an “ijtifadah,” a revolution in thinking about progress, self-criticism and tolerance. She would begin with Muslim women.

Hers is a youthful Canadian Muslim voice to be appreciatively heard and absorbed.