Irshad Manji is bringing along a bodyguard on her American book tour. She must, she says: There are threats calling for her head.
A best-seller in Canada, Manji’s controversial tome “The Trouble With Islam” was published in the United States this week. The book plays on increasing fears that the social, political and religious values of the West are threatened by the growth of Islam worldwide.
This thesis, plus the threats she said she has gotten, are enough for her enthusiastic supporters to peg her as the next Salman Rushdie, the British author elevated to worldwide fame after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death threat against him. Already, she’s become a darling of talk show hosts and book reviewers from Canada and the U.S. to Europe.
But Islamic scholars and activists dismiss Manji as “Rushdie lite.” The 35-year-old Canadian TV talk show host, they say, lacks the intellectual firepower and religious knowledge to inspire a reformation within Islam–the reason Manji says she wrote her provocative polemic.
“One main difference between Irshad and Salman Rushdie is that Rushdie had a scholarly background in Islam, and this is lacking in her book,” said Sheema Khan, a Canadian Islamic activist and intellectual.
Manji, who will appear Thursday at Barbara’s Bookstore in the Old Town neighborhood, said she is calling on Muslims to reassess a faith mired in anti-Semitism and backward ideas about women, sex and relations with the West.
`Get used to it’
“Yes, I am blunt,” she writes in the beginning chapter, which she calls a “letter” to fellow Muslims. “You’re just going to have to get used to it. In this letter, I’m asking questions from which we can no longer hide. … What’s with the stubborn streak of anti-Semitism in Islam? Who is the real colonizer of Muslims–America or Arabia?
“Is that a heart attack you’re having? Make it fast. Because if we don’t speak out against the imperialists within Islam, these guys will walk away with the show.”
This “straight talk,” Manji said in an telephone interview, is meant to “cut through fancy abstractions and academic rationalizations. Straight talk also reaches audiences that would otherwise be excluded.”
Yet it is her language, tone and simplification of everything from the Koran to Islamic and Middle East history that has irked her critics. In their view, Manji is a gift to Islam bashers: She blames the Palestinians for the conflict with Israel; she believes Islamic theology intrinsically oppresses women; and she writes that authoritarianism exists in the Arab world because of despotism in Islamic thought.
“Manji’s convoluted methodology of interpretation is repeated through the book. She has chosen to ignore completely centuries of vigorous interpretive discussion, diversity and dialogue on the Koran,” Khan wrote in a 2,000-word critique in the Literary Review of Canada. “A dose of honesty in scholarship would be welcome.
“But this is Islam, the West’s favorite whipping boy, where anything and everything goes.”
Even a Muslim whom Manji thanks in her acknowledgment doesn’t want to be thanked.
“Manji says her book is addressed to fellow Muslims. Had it been written in good faith, I would have understood her reasoning, even if I did not agree with her,” said Tarek Fatah, host of the television show “The Muslim Chronicle” in Canada. “However, her book is not addressed to Muslims. It is aimed at making Muslim haters feel secure in their thinking.”
Stephen Lee, the author’s publicist at St. Martin’s Press, said Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores across the U.S. have declined to host Manji because of security concerns. But Lynda Fitzgerald, assistant manager at Barbara’s Bookstore, said she is not planning any extra security measures.
Echoes of Rushdie
Manji is certainly not the first Muslim to call for a reformation within Islam. Scholars and intellectuals have been reassessing the faith for centuries. Nor is she the first to face harsh criticism for her views.
When Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic of Iran, issued a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, saying his book “The Satanic Verses” was blasphemous, Islamists in many countries over the next decade declared Muslim scholars who challenged their faith’s tenets to be apostates. Some were threatened and a few were killed by Muslim militants.
But observers express doubt that Manji’s book will inspire rigorous intellectual debate, saying she is neither a theologian nor an Islamic scholar.
“Progressive Islam is hitting harder and harder at the conservatives over the standstill that exists in our community,” said Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But they don’t do this by trashing the tradition.”
Manji was born in Uganda to a South Asian family and was raised a Muslim. She grew more familiar with the faith at her Islamic school in Vancouver, where her family immigrated.
A longtime journalist and an outspoken lesbian, Manji is the host of “Big Ideas,” a weekly TV show in Ontario aimed at college students. From 1998 to 2001, she was the host of “Queer Television,” a show that explored the lives of gays and lesbians.
Manji acknowledges that she lacks the credentials to seriously critique the faith but argues it doesn’t matter.
“I don’t care to `know my place,'” she writes in the book, which has appeared on best-seller lists in Canada. “Change has to come from somewhere.”
If change is going to come to Islam, said Manji’s critics, it is unlikely to come from “The Trouble With Islam.”
“If she wants to make Muslims think, she hasn’t done that,” said Alia Hogben, president of the Council on Canadian Muslim Women. “Muslim women are put off by this book. For one thing, the book is too flippant. I think sadly she should have done more research. What’s exhausting is her portrayal of Muslims in a monolithic way–that’s the tiring part.”
