Posted on 12/09/2003 6:56:32 PM PST by Phil V.
NEWSMAKER: A call for Muslim change
Irshad Manji was nine when she began questioning her faith. First, she learned that girls weren't allowed to lead prayers at her local mosque. Then she was taught to hate Jews.
"When I heard my madrassah teacher ranting against Jews for worshiping moolah more than Allah, I thought, hang on a second, that doesn't make any sense," she explains. As a pre-teen, Manji wasn't yet aware of the Pact of Umar, which relegates Jews under Islamic rule to second-class status, or the religious sanctioning of suicide terrorism. What she did know was that businesses springing up throughout Richmond, British Columbia (where her family fled in 1972 from Idi Amin's Uganda), were posting signs in Urdu, Hindi, Korean and Cantonese, not in Hebrew or Yiddish.
"I thought to myself, if you're going to bash any group for having too much commercial influence, it's not the Jews, it's us Asians," she says.
By age 14, she had commenced a 20-year personal study of the Koran after storming out of her madrassah class over the Jewish question.
"There was no 'right of return,'" she notes wryly. "In this case, there was no desire for one either."
Today, Manji, 35, is the author of The Trouble With Islam: A wake-up call for honesty and change (Random House), a critique of her faith that tackles the religion's longstanding problems with women, minorities and totalitarianism. A best-seller in Canada and Germany, the book is slated for US publication in January 2004.
In Islam, she argues, innovation has long been seen as suspect, and imitation is preached as a virtue. Tracing her religion's problems to the 11th century (when, she says, ijtihad, or independent thinking, was halted amid an atmosphere of intolerance), she argues that an Islamic reformation is needed to liberate Muslims from the self-defeating practices and teachings that, left unchecked throughout the years, plague modern-day Islam.
The solution? "Operation Ijtihad," which involves empowering Muslim women economically as a first step toward reforming the religion.
"I'm happy to say I've discovered a truly progressive side of my faith... in theory," she says.
A lesbian, feminist, practicing Muslim who calls herself a "Muslim refusenik" on a website of the same name, Manji is the founder of QueerTelevision, a Canadian TV show. "The day Syria allows for gay and lesbian pride parades is the day I, too, will be pro-Syria," she says. "I think gays and lesbians ought to be pro-diversity."
Manji is also president of VERB, a Toronto-based channel focused on youth and global diversity. Aiming to influence the next generation, she has taken her struggle to college campuses. In a recent lecture at York University, where she argued that "to defend Israel is to defend diversity," she persuaded Muslim students to start organizing a demonstration against suicide bombings.
She has received death threats and hate mail along with expressions of support from Muslims eager for change.
For Manji, though, change means action. "We can't simply chant 'Islam means peace, Islam is love, Islam leads to harmony' if all we're doing is chanting," she says.
What can the West do to help bring about an Islamic reformation?
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I'm arguing that non-Muslims do have a crucial role to play in helping along a reform of Islam. At the end of the day, the impetus comes from Muslims, but one of the cornerstones of liberalizing Islam is to empower Muslim women economically, because it's when Muslim women have their own earnings that they can begin going to their own schools and begin questioning their lot, what they've been taught about their worth in life, and what they have been told the Koran says about them.What if Western governments, the US chief among them, directed only a fraction of their national security budgets into micro-enterprise loans for women? It's economic development with a twist. If we were willing to take that route, the worst that could happen is that another level of economic development would get underway.
We live in the era of the female suicide bomber. How can you be sure that the economic liberation of women will be accompanied by moderation on issues like terrorism and anti-Semitism?
I can't be absolutely sure, but it's certainly worth a try.Here's my rationale: Most suicide bombers today are not materially poor. What they are poor in is seeing the Koran as anything other than the literal word of God. And too many Muslims, even in the West, suffer from the same poverty of critical thinking . But let's face it, economic poverty can only exacerbate that situation. So the trick is to launch an economic empowerment initiative that unleashes an incentive to think critically about the Koran, and that means focusing on those who are most oppressed by a rigid reading of the text, namely women. Operation Ijtihad revolves around liberating women as economic agents, and thereby giving them the ability to start schools, read, and question what they've been told about their own worth. That necessarily entails questioning what they've been told about the Koran's take on other issues, Jews among them. Since the Koran is often self-contradictory, containing progressive passages about Jews and not just condemnatory ones, free thinking among Muslim women could hold the key to a liberal reformation of Islam.
Do you think a permanent peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians would result in a decrease of anti-semitism?
A decrease, maybe, but not enough of a decrease. Proof positive that a political settlement won't curb Muslim Jew-hatred can be seen in Egypt and Jordan, the only two Arab Muslim states that have peace treaties with Israel. In both countries, Jew-bashing runs rampant. That's not to say I oppose peace talks. I passionately support a two-state solution. Still, I don't see this as the way to end Muslim Jew-hatred. Muslims began officially vilifying Jews and legalizing their second-class status centuries before the state of Israel existed.What could significantly curb Muslim anti-Semitism is the re-opening of our tradition of engaging with the Koran. As much as the Koran speaks of smiting and slaughtering and slavery and subjecting non-Muslims to a special tax, it also speaks of affection for Jews. The Koran actually describes Jews as an "exalted" nation and, in at least a couple of separate passages, it validates the sovereign place of Jews in the Holy Land. Muslims who wish to live by the book have to make choices about what to emphasize and what to downplay, and that means knowing that we have the option to respect rather than hate Jews.
What needs to happen for the Muslim world to truly accept Israel's right to exist?
It has to be hammered home by Muslims of good will that the Koran allows for the sovereign existence of a Jewish nation, which means that the next peace process can't be a purely secular one. To ignore the religious dimension of this issue is to cede critically important ground.How would you rate the Western media's portrayal of Muslims?
Although most Muslims say we are routinely smeared as fanatics and terrorists, the exact opposite is also happening. In our daily lives here in the West, Muslims experience daily acts of decency from non-Muslims, but the media rarely report it. After 9/11, I personally received a call from one of Toronto's most prominent ministers asking me if I was okay and what he could do to curb the hate I might now encounter. Over the next several days I got more calls of love and concern from my Jewish friends than from anybody else. Private conversations with other Muslims indicated much the same - that in classrooms, workplaces, neighborhoods, even in chat rooms, people were going out of their way to neutralize the narrow-minded.When I took this information to Statistics Canada, to an anti-racist organization, to the police, and finally to a national broadcaster, no one knew what to do with it. If all you're after is the negative experience of Muslims in North America, then you've necessarily created a lopsided picture of the reality.
Yet it seems as if many Arab and Muslim groups in North America are stressing this portrayal.
These political lobbyists thrive on feeding the depiction of Muslims as victims. After all, such portrayals keep them in business. I don't deny that some Arab-looking people, among them Israeli Jews, have been the targets of unprovoked anger. I myself was needlessly marched out of a government building during the 1991 Gulf War. But what too seldom gets audited, quantified or publicized is the opposite of Islamophobia - unsolicited displays of decency toward Muslims and Arabs.What kinds of messages are you hearing these days in the mosques?
Not all mosques are political. Some are, and from those I'm hearing two main messages: that there is a Jewish-led Western conspiracy against Islam and, even more frightening, that Muslims in the West have a responsibility to support the jihadists, if not with their sons then at least with their money. Even in a public building here in Toronto, where Muslims gather to pray every Friday, I heard a young articulate imam scream into a microphone only a few months ago that the jihad starts here. Not over there, here. He was pointing to a room full of Muslim men and he said: "If you do not exercise your responsibility to fight the jihad, then make no mistake, your children will have to do it for you. One way or another, it will happen."Why do you think liberals are so willing to find excuses for Islamic fundamentalism?
I'm befuddled myself, I really am, and that's why I had to write this book - as a plea to snap out of our complacency.
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