The Trouble with Islam A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change by Irshad Manji (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003. 247 pages.)

Abstract

Set up as an open letter to Muslims, Irshad Manji’s book contains one letter,
nine chapters, six pages of recommended readings, and three pages of
acknowledgement. Together the 247 pages charge that “[t]otalitarian
impulses lurk in mainstream Islam” (p. 3, original emphasis) and reform is
crucial for the world’s security. Her open letter informs readers that “Islam is
on very thin ice” (p. 1) with her, and asks for her charges to be heard. She
then provides an autobiographical narrative that jumps from her days as a
youngster in a Baptist after school program to a madressa and junior high
school. It moves to her career as a journalist pioneering QueerTelevision then
to 9/11 and its aftermath. Interwoven between these brief accounts are her
indictments of Islam and Muslims. She ends the book with her bid for reform.
In a colloquial style, Manji lays her heavy charge: mainstream Muslims
are “intellectually atrophied and morally impaired” (p. 55). Regardless of
their location, they are universally homophobic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic.
Those arguing otherwise are ignorant, fraudulently cry racism or
injustice when criticized, and are compliant in all the gross human rights
violations occurring in Muslim countries. Muslims who promote Islam’s
egalitarian message and reconcile contradictions by engaging in discourse
and contextualizing the Qur’an, the Shari`ah, and the Hadith, or cite cultural
influence to renounce stoning, rape laws, or discrimination are not, according
to her, following mainstream Islam as they would like to think. Rather,
they are acting despite it. Islam, according to Manji, is “really” a tribal religion
that is centrally controlled by Arabs who interpret the “Koran,” a contradictory
book suffering from “a mountain range of moods” (p. 228), to
propagate “desert Islam.” Globally, Muslims cling to “foundamentalism,” a
glorification of the Islam of the past, which actually was not as egalitarian
as they claim. This, along with Arab imperialism, are responsible for the
social ills of Muslims, not western imperialism, colonialism, or “the Jewish
conspiracy.”
Nonetheless, with Orientalist tropes and her western-cultivated commitment
to fairness and the individual, which, she informs, did not evolve from
Islam, Manji says there is room for Islam – as long as it reforms. “Operation
Ijtihad” involves questioning Islam, its tenets, and proponents by reviving ...