Irshad Manji is a journalist, author, TV personality and media entrepreneur based in Toronto. In 1972, she and her family came to Vancouver as refugees from Idi Amin’s Uganda. Ms. Magazine has named her a “Feminist for the 21st Century,” and The New York Times has called her “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.” Oprah Winfrey honored her with the first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction.” Ms. Manji hosts Big Ideas, a weekly show aimed at college students featuring thinkers who are changing how we view the world. Ms. Manji is the author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). ZH interviewed Ms. Manji on July 17 at her home in Toronto.

ZH – In your book you describe Islam as being a gift of the Jews. Really?
IM – What most people, including most Muslims, don’t realize is that Islam comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Koran itself says that it is meant only to restore earlier revelations, mainly the Torah and subsequently the Bible. It is a fact that all the biggies of Islam, as a monotheistic religion, started with Judaism, from the unity of God’s creation, the oneness of God, to the nation of everlasting life, to our inherent capacity as human beings to choose good over evil. Even the concept of free will. All of these began with Judaism.

ZH – You imply, however, that Islam is perhaps more “narrow-minded.” I think you use that phrase.
IM – I do.

ZH – What does that have to do with the current situation in Islam?
IM – The trouble with Islam today is that literalism is fast becoming mainstream. I recognize that every faith has its share of literalists. American Christianity has its fundamentalists, some of whom populate the White House. Jews have their ultra-orthodox and orthodox. Buddhists, for God’s sake, have their evangelicals. But only within Islam is literalism fast becoming mainstream. We Muslims, even here in the West, are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran came after the Torah and the Bible, chronologically and historically, it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God’s will. It is, if I can put it like this, “God 3.0,” and none shall come after it. This is a supremacy complex that even mainstream Muslims have toward the Koran. This is dangerous, because when abuse happens under the banner of my faith as it is today, most Muslims have no clue how to debate, dissent, revise or reform. Not because we’re stupid, but because we have never been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions about our holy book.

ZH – How did Islam get to that point?
IM – Let me explain what Islam once had and then what happened to it. During the golden age of Islam, roughly between the ninth and 11th centuries, the faith embraced a tradition of critical thinking known as ijtihad. Thanks to the spirit of ijtihad, 135 schools of thought flourished during this time. In Muslim Spain, for example, scholars would teach their students to abandon “expert opinion” if the experts’ own teachings contradicted the Koran or if the students came up with better evidence for their ideas. Toward the end of the 11th century, however, the gates of ijtihad were deliberately slammed shut

ZH – Why was that?
IM – For political reasons. During this time the fragile Muslim Empire, spanning from Iraq all the way to Spain, was experiencing a series of internal convulsions. Dissident denominations were popping up and declaring their own runaway governments. So, the main Muslim leader, based in Baghdad, closed ranks politically. He reduced 135 schools of thought to only four schools of thought, and pretty conservative schools of thought at that. This led to a rigid reading of the Koran and to a series of legal opinions that we know as fatwas. Not death warrants, necessarily, but legal opinions that scholars could no longer overturn or even question, but could now on pain of execution only imitate. To this very day, that’s what most Muslim scholars have been doing, imitating each other’s prejudices without much reflection or self-criticism or introspection. The intellectual heritage of Islam died from that point on.

ZH – Imitation as a mode of transmitting a tradition—might that also be viewed as uncritical obedience to authority—the authority of the past?
IM – You’re right. It becomes authoritarianism.

ZH – Yet, as I understand it, Islam has no central or single source of authority other than the Koran. There’s no Islam equivalent of the Vatican, for example.
IM – Well, yes and no…as with everything in religion! It’s true that there isn’t a single identifiable figure that leads the entire Islamic world for doctrinal purposes. But, the clergy and the clerical class in Islam have far more power today, and have had for the last 600 years, than they were ever meant to. You know, in Cairo, Al-Azhar University, which is, for lack of a better analogy, the Harvard of Sunni Islam, regularly issues fatwas, legal opinions, that various Sunni communities around the world then follow. One of the things that needs to happen is for Muslims to recogn

ZH – Your perspective, if taken seriously, could open lots of doors to conversation, and not just among Muslims.
IM – For what it’s worth, I began advocating for religious reform long before I knew what sexual orientation I was. So, I truly do not think that my being a lesbian, out or not, has influenced in a radical way my willingness to dissent with the mainstream. I think that I would have dissented whether I was straight, gay or celibate. There are bigger moral issues that have led me to this point. Not the least of which, of course, is the anti-Semitism that runs so rampant within the faith today.

ZH – You might surprise some people in the West about your convictions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What would you say about that?
IM – I would call it a pretty moderate position. I view the conflict as shared culpability. I’m pro-Palestine in the sense that I, like so many people, want an independent state for the Palestinian people. But what I will not do is let the Palestinian leadership off the hook for its role in how we’ve come to be where we are. There have been many attempts to grant the Palestinian people an independent state. But the Palestinian leadership has rejected each and every proposal. What is more galling to me as a democrat, a small d democrat, is that at no time has the Palestinian leadership ever consulted the people themselves about whether these proposals ought to be accepted or rejected. A little known fact: the Oslo Peace Agreement was never translated into Arabic so the people could read it for themselves. There actually are two occupations going on. One is the military occupation, which I cannot deny exists. But the other is the political or ideological occupation of the Palestinian people, and that can be laid at the feet of their so-called leaders. Both have to be cleaned up in order for a sustainable peace to take place.

ZH – In your book you described a revelatory moment when you were near the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
IM – I told the story about an Orthodox Jewish kid with his prayer shawl hanging out of his baggy pants and his curls dangling down from his temples. He was racing around on one of those sleek silver scooters, and I’m turning the corner into the old Jewish quarter of Jerusalem on my way to the Western Wall when he runs into me. At that moment, I thought to myself, you know, here is a child who lives what many would call an ultra-insular life in a quarter of one of the world’s oldest cities and one of the oldest quarters of that city, and he probably goes to a yeshiva and is taught all kinds of do’s and don’ts–mostly don’ts. And yet, here he has the freedom to race around on a consumer vehicle, obviously imported from somewhere in North America, and nothing stops him from identifying himself as a fun-loving free spirit. It occurred to me at that moment that if ultra-Orthodox Jews can give themselves that kind of freedom, what is stopping moderate Muslims from doing the same? We, too, percolate with paradoxes. It’s actually OK to struggle to reconcile those paradoxes. I saw something in motion about that child, and I don’t just mean the scooter, but the spirit of exuberance. I don’t see that in a lot of Muslim kids. It’s the crushing of that spirit that I am most troubled by.

ZH – On an unrelated matter, have you seen Fahrenheit 9/11? What is your take on it?
IM – My take on it is my take on Michael Moore. The world needs polemicists. Some would argue I’m one, too. But Moore routinely employs a tactic that I try to avoid. It’s the tactic of, “My fundamentalism is better than your fundamentalism.” I believe that fundamentalism of any stripe–cultural, religious, sexual, whatever–reduces each of us to something less than our multi-faceted self. It reduces issues to something less than their multi-faceted natures. I would hope, therefore, that in the kind of polemic that I write that I bring not just a degree of hope but a certain degree of reason and a respect for the grand audience that is out there. Life is much more complex because the Creator is much more complex than any of our tidy theories about life.