DEATH threats arrive regularly in her inbox. An invitation to lecture at a British university was withdrawn because of fears over security. The man who was going to translate her book into Farsi got cold feet and pulled out.

These are just some of the challenges in the life of a self-styled Muslim refusenik. But Irshad Manji is not so much refusing to be Muslim as refusing “to join an army of automatons in the name of God” — as she explains in her new book, The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change, and in an article in The Times yesterday.

Manji was in London this month as a guest of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) to address its new political forum, Faith, Politics and Human Rights. Just as LGCM is at the fore of the Anglican challenge to the biblical orthodoxy underpinning the controversy over same-sex ordinations, so Manji has become one of the few Western Muslims prepared to call openly for an end to literal readings of the Koran. Or to put it another way — as her many critics do — as a liberal revisionist and a lesbian to boot, Manji has no right to challenge the Koran in the name of Islam.

Manji is brave, funny and bright, and in the context of her personal jihad, her own struggle against fundamentalism in her religion, the issue of her sexuality is wholly secondary. She was in London to disclose Project Ijtihad, her New York-based foundation that will try to achieve a renaissance of critical thinking in Islam and, in particular, address the role of women. Ijtihad is Arabic for “struggle” and “independent opinion on a legal or doctrinal matter”.

While here, she had secret talks with a number of UK Muslim men and women, including one who is a household name, about funding for the foundation. None of these potential donors wishes to talk publicly at present. The aim is to open offices in Europe and Canada, Manji’s home country. She needs $10 million, and already a third of that has been pledged.

Slowly, in spite of understandable caution from the Muslim mainstream, she is achieving recognition. Oprah Winfrey gave her the first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction”. Ms magazine named her a “feminist for the 21st century”. The Jakarta Post in Indonesia has identified Manji as one of three Muslim women making a positive change in Islam.

This work is not full-time. Her “day job” is as host of Big Ideas, a Canadian TV programme that features innovative thinkers in fields ranging from science to spirituality. But it is her attempt to bring about an intellectual revolution in Islam and, as she puts it, restore the conditions that led to the religion’s golden age, that is giving her a new international profile.

One of her subversive acts was to post Arabic and Urdu translations of her book on her website, www.muslim-refusenik.com. They are being read in multimegabyte bucketloads by Muslims in Pakistan and the Middle East.

Manji hopes a translator can be found so that Iranians will be able to download a version in Farsi. “I get an enormous number of e-mails from young Iranians wanting the book,” she says. “The latest death threats came in response to the Pakistani book, addressed to me and my translator.” That was why the Farsi translator pulled out. “This kind of danger is one of the key reasons why I am starting Project Ijtihad,” she says.

Many British Muslims privately will discuss their concerns about extremism in their religion but few will embrace openly a concept of reform as advanced by Manji. Yet she is in no way suggesting a rejection of the Koran, merely a more open attitude to debate over what she calls its contradictions and ambiguities.

“I speak as a faithful Muslim,” she says. “I know many people immediately assume quite the opposite.” She cites a verse from the Koran (iv, 135) that instructs believers to educate themselves and bear true witness, even if it means going against themselves, their parents and their family.

“This verse is an invitation to speak up against abuses happening in the name of Allah,” she says. The verses that can be thrown back at her are, however, more numerous. Homosexuality is condemned in the Koran which says that women who commit “lewd acts” must be kept at home until they die or God brings about a change of heart. In addition, the Koran says: “You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies: they are allies only to each other.”

In his new translation of the Koran, published next week in the Oxford World Classics series, Abdel Haleem, Professor of Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, has a footnote to this inflammatory verse indicating that its real meaning is that Christians and Jews should not be taken as allies where they are against Muslims. But such semantics can be presumed lost on the likes of Osama bin Laden and his followers.

The vicious streak of anti-Semitism running through fundamentalist Islam is just one of the aspects that Manji wants Project Ijtihad to address. “I appreciate that every religion has its share of literalists,” she says. “But only within Islam is literalism mainstream to the point where even moderate Muslims take the Koran as the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God’s will. The danger is not that decent, moderate Muslims will begin hurling bombs at the so-called infidels. The danger is that it shuts down our capacity to think critically.

“Muslims, even educated ones, have not yet become interested in the possibility of asking tough questions about our holy book. The same cannot be said for moderate Christians and Jews.”

This argument has, inevitably, led to her being labelled a “closet Jew” or even an agent of Mossad. “I find it astonishing how much fellow Muslims resort to anti-Semitism in order to counter my point that anti-Semitism runs deep in the faith today,” she says.

Manji counts herself a faithful Muslim but is not a theologian, and undoubtedly her visit to this country would have created more of a stir had she been an imam or even a man. Ibrahim Mogra, of the Muslim Council of Britain, dismissed her as not a “serious partner in the debate about theology”.

Her interest in challenging her religion began when a colleague confronted her about the stoning of a young Muslim rape victim for adultery.

For Project Ijtihad to succeed as she hopes, she will need to win the backing of big names in the Muslim mainstream. This will be a struggle, a jihad, of Koranic proportions and she might easily be killed in the process. But she is no dilettante.

Her energy and determination are formidable. She will take heart from the verse in the Koran that promises closer awareness of God for those who adhere to justice.

Her enemies will cite another verse: “Those who reject faith and deny Our revelations will inhabit the blazing Fire.”