Author:
Publication: WorldNetDaily.com
Date: September 16, 2003
URL: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34606
Introduction: Staying close to police
at release of book urging Muslim reform
Fearing a backlash from radical
Muslims, the author of a book called "The Trouble with Islam" is staying
in close contact with police ahead of the title's scheduled release tomorrow.
Irshad Manji, a Toronto Muslim journalist,
is urging Muslims to purge Islam of fundamentalism, Canada's National Post
reported.
She is taking every possible step
to ensure her safety, the Post said, including forwarding to authorities
e-mails and letters from angry Muslims. But she says she is unsure how
the book will be received.
''At this point it's all about being
prepared rather than paranoid,'' she said in an interview this weekend.
One e-mail calls Manji a ''pro-Zionism
parasite ... trying too hard to back-stab your fellow brothers and sisters,"
the Post said. "Another warns: ''You will sooner or later pay for your
pack of lies.''
The book denounces terrorism, the
poor treatment of women and ''Jew-bashing," the Canadian paper reported,
while promoting human tolerance, human rights and an Islamic reformation
that begins in the West.
''I didn't write this book to be
deliberately inflammatory,'' said Manji, who describes herself as an activist,
leftist, Muslim and feminist, according to the Post.
''It's about the things that were
troubling to me as a kid and the things that are troubling young Muslims
today,' she said.
On her website, she says she appreciates
that every faith "has its share of literalists," but "what this book hammers
home is that only in Islam is literalism ... mainstream. Which means that
when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims have no clue
how to dissent, debate, revise or reform."
Anticipating a potentially violent
reaction, Manji's publisher, Random House Canada, asked Canada's solicitor
general for International Protected Person status, a designation usually
reserved for visiting heads of state, the Post reported.
Although the application was rejected,
Manji's member of Parliament, Dennis Mills, said police are aware of her
situation and maintain close contact.
The author said inspiration for
the book came from Salman Rushdie, who was the subject of a fatwa, or religious
edict ordering his death, for his book "The Satanic Verses."
Manji said she asked Rushdie several
years ago if he felt Islamic reformation began in the West, the Post reported.
''It begins with women,'' she recalled
him telling her. ''Women like you."
Actions speak
Manji, whose family came to Canada
in 1972 as refugees from Uganda, said she first got into trouble when she
began to question her teacher at the madressa, or Islamic school, she attended
weekly in Vancouver, B.C.
"I couldn't quite reconcile the
open and tolerant world of my public school with the rigid and bigoted
world inside my madressa," she said. "But I had enough faith to ask questions
- plenty of them."
Her first question was "Why can't
girls lead prayer?"
"I graduated to asking more nuanced
questions," she said, "such as, 'If the Quran came to Prophet Muhammad
as a message of peace, why did he command his army to kill an entire Jewish
tribe?'"
The questions did not sit well with
her teacher, she said, who "routinely put down women and trashed the Jews."
She reached another impasse with
her teacher, she said, when she asked, "Where is the evidence of the 'Jewish
conspiracy' against Islam? You love to talk about it, but what's the proof?"
Manji said "that question, posed
at the age of 14, got me booted out of the madressa. Permanently."
At that point, she said, she was
confronted with the choice of either walking away from Islam or giving
it another chance.
"Out of fairness to the faith, I
gave Islam another chance," she said. "And another. And another. For the
past 20 years, I've been educating myself about Islam. As a result, I've
discovered a progressive side of my religion - in theory."
She says, however, she remains a
"hugely ambivalent Muslim" because of "massive human rights violations,
particularly against women and religious minorities - in the name of Allah."
"Liberal Muslims," she says, insist
what she is describing is not "true" Islam.
"But these Muslims should own up
to something: Prophet Muhammad himself said that religion is the way we
conduct ourselves toward others," she argues. "By that standard, how Muslims
actually behave is Islam, and to sweep that reality under the rug of theory
is to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our fellow human beings."
She concludes: "That's why I'm struggling.
That's why I'm passionate. And that leads me to what I consider to be the
trouble with Islam."
