This 35-year-old Muslim is trying to shake up one of the world's largest and strictest religions with her controversial best-seller, The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change. In it, she attacks the "self-appointed ambassadors of Allah" and sets out a mandate for reform. But today she's just a woman with a salon appointment. Her hairdresser gives her a "pixie crop," but after the cut and blow-dry, she insists on doing her own styling, with her own stuff. "I never forget to bring my cheap goop with me," she says. "I'm a refugee, I can't buy into $20 hair products."

For Manji, whose family fled Uganda for Richmond, B.C., in the early 1970s, being a refugee colours everything. It's why she always takes home leftovers and why she feels compelled to make the most of her freedoms -- like writing a book that brings her as much condemnation and criticism as praise and popularity. "Corny as this may sound," she says, "I wake up every day thanking God that I wound up in a part of the world where as a Muslim woman I can dream big dreams, tap much, if not most of my potential and be engaged -- and I don't just mean for marriage."

Actually, same-sex marriage is not one of the freedoms that Manji, a lesbian in a long-term relationship, plans on exercising. "Then our parents would have to buy into a level of celebration of being gay," she says light-heartedly, "not just tolerance." She acknowledges that her outspokenness has caused her mother grief -- and that the death threats she's incurred are a parent's worst nightmare.

Upon police urging, Manji installed bulletproof windows at home, doesn't use a cellphone and sometimes travels with a bodyguard. But she tries not to let her security be at odds with her message. Sympathetic Muslims have told her they won't speak out for fear of violent persecution -- prompting Manji to handle some of her recent book tours without a bodyguard. "If I am going to have credibility in saying that it is doable to dissent and live," she says, "then I can't have a big burly guy shadowing me wherever I go. I'm going to lead by example."