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Muslim author is hard on her own faith; she tours with bodyguard

Muslim author is hard on her own faith; she tours with bodyguard

Author: Martha Sawyer Allen
Publication: Star Tribune
Date: January 24, 2004
URL: http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/4336997.html

Author Irshad Manji talks with her whole body, leaning into an answer, her dark eyes intently watching as her spiked hair moves. And what she says is difficult for fellow Muslims to hear: "Totalitarian impulses lurk in mainstream Islam." Simple things like that.

As she's talking at her restaurant table, a man in a golf shirt and slacks approaches. He introduces himself as Ernie Wish, a former Chicago city official. "I just wanted to tell you I saw you last night on Channel 11, and I thought you were a delight," he says. "What you said was important."

By now, Manji's bodyguard, a pleasant if ubiquitous presence with body- builder muscles, has been moving slowly toward the table.

Most authors don't have full-time bodyguards, but Manji's book, "The Trouble with Islam," is a blunt polemic.

She rails against what she sees as the excesses not of her faith, but of the leaders who have stolen its glory and its tradition of questioning and dissent.

"Islam needs to come to terms" with itself, she says. "We need to talk about our ill treatment of women, the Jew-baiting and bashing and the scourge of slavery that continues to this day" in Islamic nations.

Manji, 35, tells an overflow crowd of 75 at an upscale bookstore that evening, "Most Muslims have no clue how to debate their faith or reform it."

Such declarations have inspired death threats, she says. She hired a bodyguard after consulting with police in Toronto, where she lives.

Manji is a Canadian, a Muslim, a feminist, a lesbian, a journalist and now the author of a book that has been on her nation's best-seller lists for weeks and is new to U.S. bookstores. At least one major chain reports unexpectedly brisk sales in the opening days.

Manji has been called a "Muslim sellout" and much worse. But she also has been praised by some of the most famous North Americans whom Muslims love to hate. Among them is Daniel Pipes, a nationally respected historian and author whom many Muslim organizations have blasted. He said Manji is right on target. Writing in the New York Post, he said of her need for a bodyguard: "Manji's predicament is unfortunately all too typical of what courageous, moderate modern Muslims suffer."

While there are a few other liberal Muslim voices, several of them in the United States, most are in academic circles. Manji said she wants the broader public to read her arguments.

She is articulate and engaging, but some question her legitimacy as a critic of Islam. Imam Hamdy El Sawaf, head of the Islamic Council of Minnesota, said Manji's credibility is undermined because she describes herself as a feminist and lesbian.

"Someone with those qualities," El Sawaf, a longtime leading voice among Minnesota Muslims, said from his Fridley office, "I don't believe what you're saying. Go straighten yourself out first, and then come talk to me."

Manji just smiles when she hears this. "There is no room to reason with someone who says that," she said.

Even to the moderate critics, her broadsides are strident. However, El Sawaf insists that other Muslims would never say she's not a Muslim just because she attacks some of Islam's practices.

An act of faith

For her part, Manji said writing the book was "an act of faith. It's not an attack on Islam, but I'm honest enough to talk about both the theology and the practice. Why can't we come clean about it?"

She said she prays constantly, although not the prescribed five times a day.

Such rote prayer gives her nothing spiritually, she said. And she certainly wouldn't pray facing Mecca. She said that's one of the impositions on the faith by the Arab world, which, she points out, only represents 13 percent of the Muslim world.

In November, one of the key arguments against her book surfaced in a letter in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Tarek Fatah, host of a weekly Muslim television show in Canada, withdrew his public support of her book in a letter to the newspaper. "Her book is not addressed to Muslims as she writes in the foreword. It is aimed at making Muslim-haters feel secure in their thinking."

Her response a week later said, "Who precisely does he mean by Muslim- haters? Mr. Fatah recently came clean to me in a TV studio. After the cameras stopped rolling he bellowed, 'This book was written by the Jews for the Jews.' It's painful to hear such words fly from the mouth of a self-declared Muslim reformer."

Many who know her say she's a skilled self-promoter, although they don't doubt her sincerity on this issue.

Ottawa Citizen columnist Glen McGregor said he knew Manji when he was dating a roommate of hers. "She is a genius at self-promotion. She's all marketing and no substance," he said.

Manji pointed out that McGregor is a gossip columnist.

And so it goes, day in and day out as Manji makes the rounds of the news outlets selling her ideas and her book.

Provoking responses

At the signing at Barbara's Books in Chicago, little clots of people, some nervous, some angry, gathered and talked for another half-hour after her presentation.

Two American Muslim women who run a social service agency for Muslims talked of their hopes for reform, but they wouldn't give their names for fear of retaliation. Another man kept saying to those around him, "She's deceiving you. She's deceiving you."

Keeping abreast of the issues and promoting her vision of an emancipated Islamic population, in which women are literate and read the Qur'an for themselves, is a tiring process, Manji said.

She remembers leaving Uganda as a child in 1972 when Idi Amin threw out all East Asians living there. Her family moved to Vancouver, where she discovered a wonderful Western thing: "Freedom."

In her public school she could question any idea, any authority figure. She only wants that for Muslim girls in the rest of the world, she said.

She wants Muslims to have both freedom and their faith, the right to dissent and believe, and she doesn't see why it's so difficult for most of the Muslim world to appreciate that.

Near the end of the long day, the guard, who has been scanning the crowd the entire time, watches as a woman lays a coat down on the table where Manji is signing her book. Manji and the woman are intensely talking about the woman's daughter, who converted to Islam.

The bodyguard doesn't care. "Nothing on the table," he says quietly, but firmly. The startled woman removes her coat.

Martha Sawyer Allen is at 612-673-7919 or mallen@startribune.com.
 


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