IRSHAD MANJI, a Canadian Muslim, is flanked by Rob and Mara Shlachter at the Sept. 17 President’s Club dinner hosted by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.
Portland Jews hear Muslim’s message of hope
By Paul Haist
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Irshad Manji offers hope to non-Muslims who, in the maelstrom of religious violence arising from radical Islam today, have been overwhelmed by a frightening darkness that seems to be enveloping the world and in which it is a challenge to trust others not like oneself.
Manji almost certainly would add that she has a message of hope for Muslims as well, that they need not remain victims of the intolerance with which radical Islam seems to view the world outside its narrow perspective.
A refugee of Idi Amin’s Uganda who grew up in British Columbia and resides today in Toronto, Manji is a former television journalist and now a New York Times syndicated columnist, a senior fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy and the author of the variously praised and reviled 2003 book “The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith.”
Manji, who—despite many threats against her life since the publication of her book—lectures widely, shared her perspective on her faith with key leaders of Portland’s Jewish community Sept. 17 at a dinner gathering of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s President’s Club. The event was held at the Portland City Grill on the 30th floor of the Unico U.S. Bank Tower.
Speaking of her co-religionists she said, “We can no longer keep pointing fingers at everyone else. At some point, we have to take responsibility for what is happening to Islam today.”
It is a responsibility, she added, “straight out of Koranic scripture.” She cited Chapter 13, Verse 11 of the Koran, which states: Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition.
It is a responsibility, she said, that calls upon one’s capacity to act with courage.
“Some of my fellow religionists want to kill me,” said Manji. “But a rising number of young Muslims are contacting me to ask where did I find the guts to speak my mind.”
She tells them, she said, “Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the recognition that some things are more important than fear.”
Manji recounted her own awakening to the vision that has guided her life since her adolescence when she was a student in two schools—the public school she attended near Vancouver, B.C., and the madrassa or Islamic religious school she attended on Saturdays.
At the madrassa, she said, “I learned two important lessons: Women are inferior (to men) [and] Jews are treacherous, not to be trusted.”
But when she looked around her community she saw that most of the new businesses then were being established by various Asian peoples.
“I thought, ‘Maybe the Jews aren’t more concerned about business than others. What if I am not being educated at the madrassa, but indoctrinated?’”
Education, Manji explained, “allows us to open our minds,” whereas indoctrination rejects inquiry.
She asked her madrassa instructor, “Where is the proof of the Jewish plot against Islam?”
That question, said Manji, resulted in her dismissal from the madrassa, which led her to embark on a 20-year study of her faith.
She found much that was new to her.
“There are so many positive aspects of Islam that the mullahs are not teaching,” said Manji. “I would never have been introduced to these enlightened and enlightening aspects of my faith if I had not left the madrassa.”
She said that her personal journey into Islam changed something in the center of her.
“It transformed me from a person of faith to a person of conscience.”
Yet there remained a cognitive dissonance with reality.
Once, when she was working as a journalist, her editor asked her how she could reconcile her faith with sharia law that sanctioned the punishment by whipping of a Muslim woman accused of adultery, when, in fact, the accused had presented seven witnesses who testified she had been raped.
In response to her editor’s question Manji said, “My identity as a Muslim told me to get defensive, but my integrity said it was right to ask that question, no matter how politically incorrect.”
That incident precipitated a change in her life.
“From that crisis of conscience emerged my need to write ‘The Trouble With Islam Today,’” she said.
While she struggled with the decision to proceed with the book and thereby put her life on the line (“What was a girl like me from Canada doing taking on Osama bin Laden?”), she had the opportunity to speak with Salman Rushdie, the British Muslim novelist whose 1988 book “The Satanic Verses” motivated radical Muslim clerics to call for his death.
When Rushdie said to Manji, “A book is more important than a life,” she thought he was making a joke.
But then she realized, “That was a serious answer.”
Rushdie told her, “The purpose with which you live is sometimes more important than the number of years you live.”
You can’t control the latter, she explained, but you can control the former.
She said she tried without success to find an argument to counter Rushdie, so she wouldn’t have to write her book.
“But he was right,” she said.
After her book was published, Manji employed a bodyguard to protect her. While she still lives behind bulletproof glass, she has since let the bodyguard go.
She explained that if she is to have legitimacy, especially with young Muslims, she can’t have the luxury of a bodyguard.
“You have to lead by example,” she said.
Publication of her book led to a deluge of e-mail to her from young Muslims asking when the book would be published in Arabic.
Since finding an Arabic publisher for her book would be difficult, she chose instead to place translations on her Web site, www.muslim-refusenik.com.
Hundreds of thousands of Internet users, she said, have downloaded the book in Arabic, Urdu and Persian—all at no charge.
Before a Jewish audience whose willingness to trust Muslims has been more than merely tested in recent decades, Manji said, “There is a hunger for this information among young Muslims.”
She added, “You can trust them to use it.”