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.
