'Muslim Refusenik' Incites Furor With Critique of Faith
She attended a madrassa, a Muslim school, when she was 9, and began to question her faith. Every Saturday, she was instructed about Islam. Men and women, she said, entered the mosque by separate doors and prayed divided by a wall. "In the mosque," she writes in the book, "men never had to see women and women never had to be seen. If that isn't the definition of assigning us small lives, then I'm missing something big."
At 14, she says, she was expelled from the school for asking her teacher for proof that the prophet Muhammad commanded his army to kill the entire Jewish tribe.
Next she stopped going to the mosque because she felt she could not think independently there. Instead, she said, she began praying on her own. After washing her feet, arms and face, she would sit on a velvet rug and turn toward Mecca. Eventually, she stopped this as well, because she did not want to fall "into mindless submission and habitual submissiveness."
Since then, she has been on what she describes as a quest to understand her religion, and says she remains a Muslim. But she says being a Canadian means having permission to think freely. "Lord, I loved this society. I loved that it seemed perpetually unfinished, the final answers not yet known, if ever they would be," she writes in her book. "I loved that in a world under renovation, the contributions of individuals mattered."
In her book, she urges Muslims to take on ijtihad, the Islamic tradition of independent reasoning. One way she says Islam can be reformed is by giving Muslim women worldwide economic power. "Economic development unleashes incentive to think critically of the Koran, giving them resources to start schools, to stand up to their husbands," she said. "I don't idealize or romanticize how much blood can be spilled on this. Blood is being spilled anyway. The violence is going to happen, then why not risk it happening for the sake of freedom?"
Her critics say the book is simplistic, and that Manji does not have the academic credentials to criticize Islam. "The Trouble with Islam? I think Ms. Manji used the wrong title," said Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, a non-government organization that represents most of the 600,000 Muslims in Canada. "The book should be entitled: the trouble in the life of Irshad Manji. The book is a personal account of a young lady struggling with her religion, which is common among Muslims and non-Muslims. She is not a specialist to advocate Muslims should revise their religion and holy book. It is not credible."
Elmasry said the Canadian Muslim community did not want to overreact. "We did not treat her like the British Muslim community treated Salman Rushdie," he said. "We ignored her book."
Irshad defends her work. She rejects the argument that she is projecting her personal baggage onto Islam. "It has nothing to do with blaming my father's violence on Islam," she says. "These are distractions at best. People are afraid it will be taken seriously.
"I challenge my critics to answer this: With or without my personal baggage, would women in Iran still have to ask for permission to travel? Would children get hustled into slavery? With or without my father's violence, would honor killings happen twice a day in Palestine? Answer that."
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Irshad Manji, 35, has been called the "nonfiction Salman Rushdie" for "The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change."
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