Author critical of Islam ready for backlash
Staying close to police at release of book urging Muslim reform
September 16, 2003
worldnetdaily.com
Fearing a backlash from radical Muslims, the author of a book called "The Trouble with Islam" is staying in close contact with police ahead of the title's scheduled release tomorrow.
Irshad Manji, a Toronto Muslim journalist, is urging Muslims to purge Islam of fundamentalism, Canada's National Post reported.
Irshad Manji and Salmon Rushdie (Photo: www.muslim-refusenik.com)
She is taking every possible step to ensure her safety, the Post said, including forwarding to authorities emails and letters from angry Muslims. But she says she is unsure how the book will be received.
''At this point it's all about being prepared rather than paranoid,'' she said in an interview this weekend.
One e-mail calls Manji a ''pro-Zionism parasite ... trying too hard to back-stab your fellow brothers and sisters," the Post said. "Another warns: ''You will sooner or later pay for your pack of lies.''
The book denounces terrorism, the poor treatment of women and ''Jew-bashing," the Canadian paper reported, while promoting human tolerance, human rights and an Islamic reformation that begins in the West.
''I didn't write this book to be deliberately inflammatory,'' said Manji, who describes herself as an activist, leftist, Muslim and feminist, according to the Post.
''It's about the things that were troubling to me as a kid and the things that are troubling young Muslims today,' she said.
On her website, she says she appreciates that every faith "has its share of literalists," but "what this book hammers home is that only in Islam is literalism ... mainstream. Which means that when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims have no clue how to dissent, debate, revise or reform."
Anticipating a potentially violent reaction, Manji's publisher, Random House Canada, asked Canada's solicitor general for International Protected Person status, a designation usually reserved for visiting heads of state, the Post reported.
Although the application was rejected, Manji's member of Parliament, Dennis Mills, said police are aware of her situation and maintain close contact.
The author said inspiration for the book came from Salman Rushdie, who was the subject of a fatwa, or religious edict ordering his death, for his book "The Satanic Verses."
Manji said she asked Rushdie several years ago if he felt Islamic reformation began in the West, the Post reported.
''It begins with women,'' she recalled him telling her. ''Women like you."
Actions speak
Manji, whose family came to Canada in 1972 as refugees from Uganda, said she first got into trouble when she began to question her teacher at the madressa, or Islamic school, she attended weekly in Vancouver, B.C.
"I couldn't quite reconcile the open and tolerant world of my public school with the rigid and bigoted world inside my madressa," she said. "But I had enough faith to ask questions – plenty of them."
Her first question was "Why can't girls lead prayer?"
"I graduated to asking more nuanced questions," she said, "such as, 'If the Koran came to Prophet Muhammad as a message of peace, why did he command his army to kill an entire Jewish tribe?'"
The questions did not sit well with her teacher, she said, who "routinely put down women and trashed the Jews."
She reached another impasse with her teacher, she said, when she asked, "Where is the evidence of the 'Jewish conspiracy' against Islam? You love to talk about it, but what's the proof?"
Manji said "that question, posed at the age of 14, got me booted out of the madressa. Permanently."
At that point, she said, she was confronted with the choice of either walking away from Islam or giving it another chance.
"Out of fairness to the faith, I gave Islam another chance," she said. "And another. And another. For the past 20 years, I've been educating myself about Islam. As a result, I've discovered a progressive side of my religion – in theory."
She says, however, she remains a "hugely ambivalent Muslim" because of "massive human rights violations, particularly against women and religious minorities – in the name of Allah."
"Liberal Muslims," she says, insist what she is describing is not "true" Islam.
"But these Muslims should own up to something: Prophet Muhammad himself said that religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others," she argues. "By that standard, how Muslims actually behave is Islam, and to sweep that reality under the rug of theory is to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our fellow human beings."
She concludes: "That's why I'm struggling. That's why I'm passionate. And that leads me to what I consider to be the trouble with Islam." |
