The Trouble With Writing About Islam
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It’s to be expected that an author with a book on the verge of publication will lose her cool over a last-minute detail or two. Some might get nervous that their facts won’t hold up and run a paranoid, final check. Others might worry about what to wear to their book party. When Irshad Manji’s book was about to hit the stands, her concern was a bit different. She feared for her life.
Certain her incendiary book “The Trouble with Islam” would set off outrage in the Muslim community, she called the police, told them she was working on a book that was highly critical of Islam, and asked if they could advise her on safety precautions. They came to visit her Toronto apartment building several times and suggested she install a state-of-the-art security system, bulletproof windows, and hire a counterterrorism expert to act as her personal bodyguard. She warned her tenants that they might be receiving unwanted, potentially violent, visitors. The tenants thanked her, then moved out.
When I met Ms. Manji, who was dressed in a charcoal-gray pantsuit, she offered me a choice of orange juice or water but didn’t take either herself. She was observing Ramadan, the month-long Muslim holiday that forbids food or drink before sunset. She was in Manhattan to serve on a panel at New York University School of Law, and staying in the vast, luxury Upper West Side apartment of a new fan-turned-friend, an older widow who happens to be out of town for the duration of Ms. Manji’s visit.
Ms. Manji has been dismissed as a media darling, but that might stem from her knack for the interview. In her native Canada she hosted a television program for young viewers about intellectual issues and she knows how to give a polished performance. Questions don’t trip her up. Even when I asked about her spiky hair, she responded, “Do you know that last week I posted that in the FAQs on my Web site?” It’s molding putty #3 by Salon Selectives. “This is the only hairdo that’s ever worked for me,” she said.
In her short, plucky book she comes down hard on modern-day Islam, charging that the religion’s mainstream has come to be synonymous with literalism. Since the 13th century, she said, the faith hasn’t encouraged – or tolerated – independent thinking (or as its known in the faith, itjihad).
What was an enlightened society has become anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and backward. “Pick a Muslim country, any Muslim country,” she wrote, “and the most brutal humiliations will grab you by the vitals.”
The book has been out for more than a year, but Ms. Manji’s schedule of lectures and interviews has yet to ease up. She receives about 200 letters a day from visitors to her Web site, and she posted an Arabic version of her book there for readers in the Middle East to peruse in the privacy and safety of their own homes. An Urdu-language edition will be out in Pakistan by the end of the year now that she, at last, found a Pakastani publisher committed to distributing the book.
Ms. Manji has yet to be physically assaulted, but she said she receives several threats on her Web site every day (and occasionally in person), and a few mullahs have issued fatwas with her name on them. She clarified: “The Middle East mullahs who have issued fat was are not major clerics; I’d say they’re rag-tag mullahs who have small constituencies.” When she lectures at universities, she said, it’s typical for a band of traditional young Muslims to stand in the back of the room, cross their arms, and stare her down.
The book, which is written like a letter, is both thoughtful and confrontational. In person, Ms. Manji embodied the same conflicting spirit. She was affable and wore a broad smile. Her upbeat, nervous energy rose to the task of filling in every potentially awkward pause. At times her verbosity and eagerness to get her ideas across lent her the air of an 8-year-old who’s at home at the front of the class, or anywhere else she can talk to adults. (One of her favorite factoids: “Prophet Mohammed was quite a feminist.”)
Her journey scrutinizing Islam started when she was a 8-year-old and taking weekly religious classes at a madrasa (religious school) in suburban Vancouver. Her anti-Semitic teacher Mr. Khaki never took her questions seriously; he merely told her to accept everything because it was in the Koran. She wanted to know why she had to study it in Arabic, which she didn’t understand, and was told the answers were “in the Koran.”
Her questioning ended up getting her kicked out of school at 14, and she embarked on a 20-year-long private study of the religion. While she finds the treatment poured on women and foreigners in Islam nations indefensible, she said that she continues to be a believer because the religion provides her with her values. “And I’m so glad I did because it was then I came to realize that there was this really progressive side of my religion and it was this tradition of critical thinking called itjihad. This is what allows me to stay within the faith.”
She called herself a “Muslim refusenik” because she remains committed to the religion and yet she doesn’t accept what’s expected of Muslim women. As terrorist acts and suicide bombings refuse to subside, she said it’s high time for serious reform within the Islamic faith.
She said many young Muslim supporters are still afraid to come out about their support of her. “Even before 9/11 it was the young Muslims who were emerging out of these audiences and gathering at the side of the stage. They’d walk over and say, ‘Irshad, we need voices such as yours to help us open up this religion of ours because if it doesn’t open up we’re leaving the mosques.”
She wants Muslims to start thinking critically about their religion, and to start asking more questions. “Most Muslims have never been introduced to the possibility let alone the virtue of asking questions about our book,” she said. “We have never been taught the virtue of interpreting the Koran in different ways.”
Right now she’s working with a group of young Muslims to launch the Institute for Independent Thinking in Islam, which will be a leadership center for young Muslims to learn about the history of the golden age of Islam and give them confidence to debate and dissent. She’s also working on a feature-length documentary based on her book. Anything to bring on self-reflection within the Muslim faith, and, with any hope, reform.
“Muslims are afraid of being killed,” she said. “Non-Muslims are afraid of offending. That doesn’t give us a lot of room.”