Author:
Publication: Independent
Date: May 5, 2004
URL: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/interviews/story.jsp?story=518139
Irshad Manji is a lesbian Muslim
who says her religion is stuck in the Middle Ages. The outspoken author
tells Johann Hari how she became a target for assassination
The death threats began six months
ago. One morning, Irshad Manji opened her e-mail and read the first of
many pledges to kill her. "It contained some pretty concrete details that
showed a lot of thought had been put into the death-threat," she explains
now, unblinking. She can't say how many she's received - "The police tell
me not to talk about this stuff" - but she admits that "they are becoming
pretty up-close and personal."
"One story that I can tell you,"
she says, "a story that I have the permission from the police to tell you,
is that I was in an airport in North America recently and somebody at the
airport recognised me. I had a conversation with them. While I was engaged
in conversation with a very portly, very sweet fifty-something man and
his wife, an Arab guy came up to my travel companion and said, 'You are
luckier than your friend.' As a nice polite Canadian she asked, 'What do
you mean?' and he didn't say anything. He turned his hand in to the shape
of a gun and he pulled the make-believe trigger towards my head. She didn't
know what to make of this, so she asked him to clarify his intentions.
He said 'Not now, you will find out later,' and then he was gone."
Sitting with Irshad in a London
boardroom, it would be hard for anybody to guess that she is the star attraction
on jihadist death-lists. She has the small, slender body of a ballet-dancer,
and a Concorde-speed Canadian voice that makes her sound more like a character
in a Woody Allen movie than an enemy of Osama Bin Laden's. So what has
she done to earn a bullet in the head?
Irshad is a key figure in the civil
war within twenty-first century Islam. She is the Saladin of progressive
Muslims, an out-rider for the notion that you can be both a faithful Muslim
and a mouthy, fiercely democratic Canadian lesbian. As one American journalist
put it, "Irshad Manji does not drink alcohol and she does not eat pork.
In every other respect, she is Osama Bin Laden's worst nightmare."
"What I want is an Islamic reformation,"
she says, leaning forward, her palms open. "Christianity did it in the
sixteenth century. Now we are long overdue. If there was ever a moment
for our reformation, it's now, when Muslim countries are in poverty and
despair. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?"
We are all going to have to learn
about this battle for an Islamic reformation, because it will be raging
- and occasionally blasting its way onto our city streets - for the rest
of our lives. Manji's best-selling book, 'The Trouble With Islam - a Wake-Up
Call For Honesty and Change', is both a crash course in its terminology
and a manifesto for the progressive side. The core concept in Maji's thought
- and that of all progressive Muslims - is 'itjihad'. It's a simple idea,
and devastatingly powerful. Itjihad is the application of reason and reinterpretation
to the message of the Koran. It allows every Muslim to reconsider the message
of the Koran for the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century.
"What was true for ninth century Mecca and Medina may not be the best interpretation
of Allah's message today", Irshad explains.
This seems obvious to post-religious
European ears, but it is (literally) heresy to conservative and even most
mainstream Muslims. "At this stage, reform isn't about telling ordinary
Muslims what not to think. It's about giving them permission to think.
We can't be afraid to ask: what if the Koran isn't perfect? What if it's
not a completely God-authored book? What if it's riddled with human biases?"
"We Muslims have to understand our
own history," she says. "Itjihad isn't some wacky new idea. When Muslims
were at their most prosperous, their most innovative, their most respected,
it was when we practised itjihad, in Islam's golden age from 750 to 1250
CE. The greatest Muslim philosopher, Ibn Rushd, championed the freedom
to reason."
"It was the closing of the gates
of itjihad that led to disaster for Muslims, not the Crusdaers or the West
or anything else. Sure, they were all bad, but the decline started with
us," Irshad says. "It's the refusal to believe in independent reason that
has contributed to a totalitarian culture in the Muslim world. Of course
if Muslims can't reason for themselves, they become dependent on Mullahs
and outside authorities. Of course if you think all truth is contained
in one book and all you have to do is return to it - a belief I call 'foundationalism'
- then you won't be dynamic and seek new solutions for new problems. Others
have responsibilities as well, but we Muslims closed the gates of itjihad
on ourselves. We need to take responsibility for that, and turn it around."
It was in the twelfth century that
Baghdad scholars "formed a consensus to freeze debate within Islam," she
explains, and "we live with the consequences of this thousand-year old
strategy. They did it to keep the Islamic empire from imploding - they
thought all this dissent and disagreement would lead us to fall apart.
But I've got news for you: The Islamic empire no longer exists, and our
minds still remain closed."
In case this sounds cerebral - how
could this arid intellectual debate have such a drastic effect on the world?
- Irshad is quick to underline its practical effects. From the mass-murder
of democrats in Algeria to the uprising of students against the Mullahs
in Iran, from the mosques of Finsbury Park to the ethnic cleansing being
perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan, "this is the fight between
progressive Islam and the Islamofascists."
Irshad does not just rant against
Islamic fundamentalism. She offers a constructive long-term programme for
undermining it, which she dubs 'Operation Itjihad.' The solution lies with
Muslim women. "At the moment, half the resources of Muslim societies -
the women - are squandered. Yet investing in women makes amazing sense.
Educate a Muslim boy and you've educated a boy. Educate a Muslim woman
and you've educated a whole family. The multiplier effect of helping Muslim
women is amazing."
So 'Operation Itjihad' would require
us to redeploy a large chunk of our aid and national security budgets to
small business loans for Muslim women. "Micro- lending has an extraordinary
30 year-track-record. For example, in Bangladesh the Grameen ('Village')
Bank loans tiny amounts of money to people whom standard lenders consider
untouchable - especially landless women. They have helped 31 million people,
and they have a staggering repayment rate of 98%. Helping women achieve
financial independence en masse butresses their existing, often underground,
attempts to become literate. They won't need the oracles of the big boys
if they can reach their own conclusions about what the Koran says.
"Empowering women is the way to
awaken the Muslim world," she continues. "If you are serious about undermining
the culture that created al-Quaeda, this is the way to do it. When women
have money they have earned themselves, they are far more likely to begin
the crucial task of questioning their lot. It will transform a culture
of hate and stagnation." This feminism shouldn't be alien to good Muslims,
she adds. "Mohammed's beloved first wife Khadija was a self- made merchant
for whom the Prophet worked for many years. I sometimes point out to Muslim
men that if they are serious about emulating the Prophet, then they should
go work for their wives." What do they say? "There is a dour, sour silence."
"Then I remind them that it was
Ibn Rushd who said - way ahead of any European feminists - that the reason
civilisations are poor is that they do not know yet, the ability, the full
ability, of their women," she continues. So how did Islam get so entwined
with a misogynist culture? "I think you have to distinguish between Islam
and the Arabic culture of the ninth and tenth centuries that very quickly
became entwined with it. We have to disentangle Islam from the norms of
the desert. Desert Islam was always opposed to the pluralistic, haggling
life of the el-haraa - the urban alleyway bazaars. It is fanatic. Islam
was meant to move the Arabs beyond tribe. Instead, tribe has moved the
Arabs beyond Islam."
Irshad is needlingly, constantly
aware that she could not even begin to enjoy the freedom she currently
enjoys in any Muslim society. Her family were refugees from Idi Amin's
West African tyranny, and the family washed up in Canada when Irshad was
four years old. "I am also aware it wasn't Islam that fostered my belief
in the dignity of every individual. It was the democratic environment to
which I and my family migrated. In this part of the world, as a Muslim
woman, I have the freedom to express myself without fear of being maimed
or tortured or raped or murdered at the hands of the state. You know, as
corny as this may sound, as a refugee to the West, I wake up every day,
thanking God that I wound up here."
She grew up with "a miserable father
who despised joy" and exhibited the worst of the Mullah mentality. Then
in her local mosque - as an inquisitive, open- minded girl - she became
aware of an attempt to "close my mind. It was a 'shut up and believe' mentality,"
she says. "Even in a free society where nobody was going to challenge us
or hurt us for asking questions, even then our minds were still slammed
shut. A crude, cruel strain within Islam continues to exist in even the
most cosmopolitan of cities. That shows it isn't just external evil influences
that have done this. We have - I repeat - done it to ourselves."
Irshad knows that she is dragging
into the open an argument many Western Muslims have confined to their own
minds for a very long time. She is critical of the "reflexive identification
some Muslims in the West unthinkingly offer to groups like Hamas or the
Taliban. I met one person [like that] at Oxford University last night.
I asked, 'Do these women realise that the very groups and individuals whom
they are defending are the very people who, if they were in power here,
would frankly their daughters particularly of their right to be at Oxford
at all?'"
She is frustrated that more moderate
Muslims do not fight. "At all of the public events I've done to promote
this book, not once have I seen a moderate Muslim stand up and look an
extremist in the eye and say, 'I'm Muslim too. I disagree with your perspective.
Now let's hash it out publicly.' Yes, after the event people tip-toe up
to me and say, 'Thank you for what you are doing.' And there are times
when I really want to say, 'Where was your support when it mattered? Not
for my ego. But to show the extremists that they are not going to walk
away with the show.'"
"It's insane that I get sometimes
accused of 'Islamophobia', or offering comfort to people who hate Islam,"
she quickly adds, anticipating my next question. "I like to respond to
that by talking about Matthew Shepherd [a young gay man who was recent
crucified and burned to death in Texas]. I say to my good-hearted liberal
friends, would you have let these yahoos get away with insisting that gay-
bashing is part of their culture and as a result they deserve immunity
from scrutiny on that front? Well, why is misogyny and homophobia in Saudi
Arabia any different? No, it's up to us Muslims in the West to drop reactionary
charges of racism against the whistleblowers of Islam - people like me
and your heroic colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - and lead the charge for
change."
She believes we are falling for
a false kind of moral equivalence between democratic societies and tyrannies.
"For example, the next time you hear an Islamo-fetishist, an imam of the
ninth-century school, wax eloquent that Muslim societies today have their
own forms of democracy thank you very much, we don't need to take any lessons,
right there, ask him a few questions. What rights do women and religious
minorities actually exercise in these democracies? Not in theory, but in
actuality. Don't tell me what the Koran says, because the Koran, like every
other holy book, is all over the map, ok. No, tell me what is happening
on the ground."
She continues, her voice hard and
rhythmic, "Tell me when your people vote in free elections. Tell me how
many free uncensored newspapers there are in your 'democracy'. There is
I believe, such a thing as the soft racism of low expectations. And I believe
that there is more virtue in expecting Muslims like anybody else, to rise
above low expectations, because you know what? We're capable of it."
It will not ultimately be Western
bombs or Western markets that defeat Islamic fundamentalism. It will be
women like Irshad, refusing to allow their religion to be dominated by
fanatics. But there are a lot of people who want to stop her. "I actually
don't live my life in fear, no not at all," she says, not entirely convincingly.
"In fact I'll tell you right now, I deliberately did not bring my bodyguard
to Britain with me against the better judgement of many people who want
to see me alive."
"If I am going to convince young
Muslims in particular that it is possible to dissent, and live, I can't
be sending the mixed message of having the bodyguard shadowing me wherever
I go," she says, her voice now uncharacteristically low and soft. "Even
if something terrible happens, I stand by the decision, because I think
at this stage it is far more important to give young people hope, to give
them a sense of real optimism that there is room to be unorthodox."
