Features

The suicide hijackers behind the 9/11 attacks were reportedly each promised “70 virgins in Paradise.” But would they have proceeded if they’d realized that their recruiters might only be offering 70 white raisins? 

The Koran and Hadith (Muslim gospel) passages about the rewards to “martyrs” can be read either way, according to a linguistic historian quoted in Irshad Manji’s book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith. And among the book’s central points is the lethal danger of interpreting scriptural metaphor literally. 

“Every religion has its share of literalists,” Manji acknowledged in an April 19 talk at UC Berkeley’s Pauley Ballroom. “American Christianity has its evangelicals, some of whom still populate the highest office in the land. Jews have their ultra-Orthodox. ... Even Buddhists have fundamentalists.” 

But “the trouble” with her own faith, Manji said, is that “only within Islam today is literalism mainstream worldwide.” 

Even moderate Muslims, Manji said, often believe that because the Koran was written after the Torah and the Bible, it is a literal “manifesto of God’s will...it is ‘God 3.0,’ and none shall come after it.” Manji called this a dangerous “supremacy complex.” 

“When abuse happens under the banner of Islam today,” she said, even Muslims “with fancy titles and formal educations do not yet know how to debate and dissent with the jihadists. ... It’s because we have not yet been introduced to the possibility of asking questions about our ‘perfect’ holy book.” 

Manji’s book is a manifesto of a different sort—one devoted, she says, to “helping Islam rediscover its glorious humanitarian potential.” Manji challenges her fellow Muslims to recover a tradition of independent thinking and reasoning known as “ijtihad.” 

Although the word has the same root as “jihad,” meaning “to struggle,” Manji emphasized that neither term originally had violent connotations. 

“In the early centuries of Islam, thanks to ijtihad, 135 schools of thought flourished,” Manji said. “In Muslim Spain, scholars would teach their students to abandon ‘expert opinion’ about the Koran if their own conversations...came up with better evidence.” 

This pluralistic era produced one of the world’s first universities, in ninth-century Baghdad, said Manji. She also credited ijtihad with early Islam’s contributions to “Western pop culture.” 

“Muslims gave the world Mocha coffee (you’re welcome!). ... Cough syrup. The guitar.” 

The plain-spoken, sometimes glib Manji might seem an unlikely catalyst for what she calls an “Islamic reformation.” She’s an ethnically South Asian, Ugandan-born, Canadian-raised, spiky-haired, out lesbian who has been a legislative aide and political speechwriter, and who is best known in Canada as a television host and producer. Like a lot of Berkeley residents, she has a multifaceted identity, for which she makes no apology. 

She’s also a lay Muslim who got herself permanently thrown out of her madressa (Saturday religious school) at age 14 after years of asking too many “hard” questions about doctrine. But inspired by heroes who included Socrates, she kept asking those hard questions and kept studying Islam on her own. 

“I could have walked away,” she said, “and gone on with becoming a materialistic North American for whom the mall is the God, as some Muslims quietly do.” Instead, she said, she happily discovered “a truly progressive side of my faith.” 

Since publishing this book—her second—in 2003, when she was 35, Manji has received praise, condemnation, and death threats. She installed bulletproof glass in her Toronto home, and hired a bodyguard for her first book tour. Two uniformed UC police officers guarded her Berkeley talk. 

Why risk her safety by writing what she calls her “open letter” for reform? Manji said she saw it as an obligation. 

“The Islamic reformation begins in the West,” she writes, because “it’s here that we [Muslims] enjoy precious freedoms to think, express, challenge, and be challenged without fear of state reprisal.” 

“I speak as a refugee when I say this is a precious gift,” she told her Berkeley audience. “And I’m asking my fellow Muslims: What in God’s name are we doing with this gift?” 

The book indicts “desert tribalism” for restraining Islam’s progress in crucial areas: the ill-treatment of women in the Muslim world, the “Jew-bashing and Jew-baiting in which too many Muslims persistently engage,” “the continuing scourge of slavery” under Islamist regimes, and those regimes’ suppression of basic human rights. 

“In the last 100 years alone,” Manji said, “more Muslims have been tortured and murdered at the hands of other Muslims than at the hands of any foreign imperial power.” 

To address these problems, Manji believes, ordinary Muslims must ultimately gain the confidence to question received interpretations of their faith. For many outside the West, a first prerequisite is basic literacy. And for Western Muslims and non-Muslims who want to help, the book proposes a plan of action. 

“I call this thoroughly non-military campaign ‘Operation Ijtihad’,” Manji said. “It begins by liberating the entrepreneurial talents of women in the Muslim world, by providing them with ‘micro-enterprise’ loans.” These $100-$300 investments were pioneered by Bangladesh’s renowned Grameen Bank. 

“There is absolute consensus within Islam,” Manji said, “that when a Muslim woman earns her own assets—let’s say by starting a business—she gets to keep 100 percent of those assets, and do with them as she sees fit.” 

“What could Muslim women do with these assets?” Manji asked. “They could become literate. They could learn to read the Koran for themselves,” rather than “merely swallowing...the selective verses that mullahs and imams tend to shove down their throats.” 

Manji quoted a photographer friend’s encounter with a woman entrepreneur in Afghanistan who had followed exactly this path.  

“You know the progressive verses in the Koran that you identify in your book?” her friend told Manji. “She found the verses you’re talking about, she recited them to her abusive husband, and ever since then, he has not laid an unwanted finger on her.” 

“This,” Manji said, “is the power not just of the Koran, but also of literacy.” 

Manji also mentioned women in Kabul, Afghanistan, who have used their capital to open schools for girls. She quoted a banner there that read, “Educate a boy and you educate only that boy, but educate a girl and you educate her entire family.” 

“As economists might put it, the ‘multiplier effect’ of investing in Muslim women cannot be underestimated,” Manji said. She raised the prospect of wealthy nations “taking just a sliver of their defense budgets...and pooling them into a coherent program of micro-business loans for women in the Islamic world.” 

At a recent Stanford University conference, Manji was delighted to hear Lt. Gen. John Abizaid—who commands U.S. forces in the Middle East—independently propose investing in similar loans to Muslim women. 

Manji’s nonviolent struggles have sometimes taken place with her own mother, a devout Muslim who admonished her “not to anger God” in writing the book. When her mother first attended mosque after the book’s publication, she was brought to tears by an imam who denounced her daughter as “more criminal than Osama bin Laden.” 

But fellow congregants quickly came over to tell her, “I’ve read Irshad’s book, and what she’s saying absolutely needs to be expressed.” 

Manji proudly displayed a greeting card that her mother slipped into her suitcase shortly afterwards. It read, “Bravo! My dear daughter, I’m so proud of your achievement. You go, girl!”  

“I leave you with the same message that my mother gave to me,” Manji told Muslims and non-Muslims in her audience. “You go! Dare to ask questions out loud. That’s how open societies remain open.” 

THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM TODAY: A MUSLIM’S CALL FOR  

REFORMING HER FAITH 

By Irshad Manji 

St. Martin’s Griffin, 240 pages, $12.95 

Israd Manji’s website:  

www.muslimrefusenik.com.