The Trouble With Irshad Manji

Irshad Manji’s The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith was bound to create controversy, and although it hasn’t received a Salman-Rushdie style fatwa, it’s certainly generated its fair share of debate. Its author, Canadian-Muslim gay activist Irshad Manji, asks some blunt questions of Islam: does Islam really condone the subjugation of women, the demonization of minorities and homosexuals, and encourage terrorism and anti-Semitism? If so, why? If not, where did Islam go wrong?

As a Muslim, Manji feels that she is best positioned to hold up a mirror to her fellow Muslims and ask them if they like the reflection they see. In fact, the answers would be truly fascinating to both Muslim and non-Muslim alike – if they were asked in the spirit of true scholarship. However, The Trouble With Islam is an exercise in circular reasoning, self-propagation, and the repetition of tiresome “factoids” that make their way to the front page of newspapers, soundbites on television, and placards in protest marches whenever an injustice has been done in the world and a Muslim is the perpetrator.

At the beginning of her book, Manji poses a complex question, couched in seemingly simple terms: “By virtue of being a Muslim, (is) every Muslim virtuous?” The answer, naturally, is no, and Manji herself seems to understand that. In this way, one can read the entire debate along the lines that Islam is a great religion, but its followers have gone off the track. Yet Manji rejects this out of hand. Her theory is that Muslims claim Islam is a virtuous religion, but it really is despotic, unjust, and oppressive.

This extremely harsh accusation is not immediately clear at first. Manji’s main point is ostensibly this: that Islam needs reform. It’s a religion that had the potential to be great, but things went drastically wrong somewhere. Every word of the Quran is read and believed literally, which means that women and minorities are oppressed, terrorism is encouraged, anti-Semitism is applauded. Worse still, the laws and regulations put into place centuries ago have been set in stone and are not being updated to reflect our modern times.

Manji proposes that Muslims take charge of an internal movement to reform the faith by restarting a tradition called Ijtihad, which promotes independent thinking. By encouraging Muslims to think for themselves, creatively and openly, they will come up with a more dynamic, just, and appealing Islam, because the injustices perpetrated in its name will be abolished. Operation Ijtihad, Manji’s brainchild, will economically empower woman and help them regain control of their lives. Other goals include: to encourage interfaith action with items like an “Abrahamic hajj” where Christians and Jews travel for pilgrimage to Mecca, caompus debates about the duplicity of Saudi Arabia, and stopping religiously-motivated genocide, such as what takes place in “Arab-occupied Sudan”.

Although Operation Ijtihad starts out strong, look closely and you’ll see a desire to discredit Islam, demonize Arabs, and question the authenticity of the Quran. This is nothing new – and many of Manji’s arguments are ideas are nothing but a repetition of what’s been thrown at Muslims by Zionists, atheists, fundamentalist Christians, and now Washington neoconservatives, for years and years. But for all her posturing about honesty, Manji attempts this in a dishonest way: by supporting her opinions and ideas with a series of inaccuracies, errors, and fallacies, a very poor quality of research, unbalanced writing, and sweeping generalizations about everything from the motivations of fifteenth century Mongol conquerors to the status of minorities in Pakistan in the twenty-first century.

To begin with, some of the most important terms are incorrectly defined.
Manji says that the Shariah, or the code of Islamic law, is “…‘nothing more than the legal opinion of classical jurists’… constructed during the days of empire, these codes have been imitated ever since.” Therefore, says Manji, Islamic law codes are medieval and barbaric, not holy but “hoeey”. Manji neglects to mention that the Shariah are derived from the Quran, the sunnah (ways of the Prophet) and hadith (sayings of the Prophet) and so have a major some connection or tie to holiness – but they are not set in stone.

Indeed, Ijtihad was the method by which a jurist could apply independent reasoning to the Shariah in order to make it apply to contemporary circumstances. But Manji understands Ijtihad not as a technical legal term but instead “the Islamic tradition of independent reasoning which… allowed every Muslim, female or male, straight or gay, old or young, to update his or her religious practice in light of contemporary circumstances.”

Speaking of credibility, let’s see what Manji has to say about the Quran.
“Most Muslims treat the Koran as a document to imitate rather than interpret, suffocating our capacity to think for ourselves… as the final manifesto, it’s the ‘perfect’ scripture – not to be questioned, analyzed, or even interpreted, but simply believed.” Casting aside the thousands of books, texts, and articles written that question, analyze, and interpret the Quran, written over fourteen hundred years by Muslim scholars from around the world, Manji attempts her own amateur interpretations of what she reads in the Quran. She accuses others of literalism when reading the Quran, but attempts nothing more than the same level of literalism.

This is another major flaw in Manji’s book: lack of balance. Manji has simply forgotten that for any kind of work to be taken seriously, the writer must weigh her assertions and ideas against opposing points of view. This is all too evident in the two chapters that outline her trip to Israel. One of Manji’s main contentions is that Islamic countries put minorities in an inferior position, and she cites the Pact of Umar as proof of the dhimmitude, a word coined by the Egyptian scholar Bat Ye’or to signify “Islam’s ideology of wholescale discrimination against Jews and Chrsitians”. But when the same attitude is displayed by Israeli Jews towards their Palestinian Muslim minorities, Manji finds a million excuses for the excesses committed against the Palestinians, all of which somehow manage to blame the Palestinians for the situation they find themselves in: Palestinian lack of introspection, their desire to play victim, their propensity towards violence and suicide bombings. For Islamic countries, it’s “dhimmitude”, but for Israel, it’s “putting its minorities at a disadvantage.”

The third fatal flaw of this book is the fact that while Manji wants to be taken as a Muslim who sincerely wishes to see reform take place within Islam, she has set herself up as a person whom Muslims cannot trust.

Accusations of pushing a Zionist or neoconservative agenda come to mind when reading her opinions about who’s at fault for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but there’s no law anywhere that says Manji can’t be pro-Israeli. Unfortunately, this is not the best position from which to try to convince Muslims that Islam needs serious reform and that Muslims need serious self-improvement.

Manji believes that she’s appealing to young Muslims everywhere with her straight-talking, candid language and style. But she is more likely to alienate Muslims with her caustic attitude and tone. By calling a chador a “condom” over her head, comparing Islam to a plane called “Air Koranistan”, making fun of suicide bombers because the seventy-two virgins they think they’re promised in heaven are actually white raisins, and writing two pages comparing Osama bin Laden to the Prophet Muhammed, Manji wants to show her readers her take-no-prisoners attitude. All she succeeds in showing them is her deep disdain and disrespect for the psychology and sensibilities of Muslims. Manji thinks that her chutzpah will win her fans amongst Muslims raised in the West, but she forgets that Muslims the world over much prefer someone who shows respect, if not deference, for the tenets of their faith and for their customs.

How can Muslims believe Irshad Manji is a sincere proponent for change when she has written a book with so many mistakes and inaccuracies, and exchanged meaningful debate with Muslims for her own suppositions about how Muslims might counter her argument? Can there be any room for such errors in a word intended to inform thoughtful debate, or will her reading of history and politics and world events create only more chaos and confusion? Do Manji’s stories of an incompetent madressah teacher, an abusive father, and her female partner Michelle engender sympathy or mistrust amongst her readers? Did Manji even have a Muslim of any scholastic standing whatsoever read over her manuscript to ensure fairness? These are the hard questions that should be asked of Manji when it comes time to judge the merit of her book.