[Reader-list] Review of Irshad Manji's "The Trouble With Islam Today: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change"

[Vikhar Ahmed]

30th June 2006

Dear Sarai Fellows,

This mail contains a review that I wrote for The Biblio: A Review of Books
for the May-June 2006 issue. I would appreciate comment and feedback.

A Polemical Work against Islam

By VIKHAR AHMED SAYEED

The Trouble With Islam Today: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change
By Irshad Manji
Imprint One, New Delhi, 2005, xiii + 258 pp., Rs. 295
Distributed by Foundation Books
ISBN 81-88861-02-2





Why am I a Muslim? Is it because I was born a Muslim or is it because I
believe in Islam. The two positions are not contradictory; I could be a
person who was born a Muslim and also believe this is the best faith among
the panoply of spiritual alternatives available. I've never given the
question significant thought until reading Irshad Manji's provocative *The
Trouble With Islam Today: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change*. This is
Manji's second book after *Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New
Democracy *published
in 1997. Manji grew up in Canada and her experiences in understanding Islam
in Vancouver form a major part of the early chapters of her book.

            Manji's book primarily targets Muslims and forces them to
confront their shibboleths. The book is in the form of an open letter and
the introductory chapter begins with an address to "My Fellow Muslims". It
is the beginning of a personal memoir and is passionate, controversial,
irreverent and even blasphemous at times as this quote demonstrates,
"Through our screaming self-pity and our conspicuous silences, we Muslims
are conspiring against ourselves. We're in crisis, and we're dragging the
rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic
reformation, it's now. For the love of God, what are we doing about it?".

Her book is partly an autobiography, a travelogue, a polemic against
practised Islam, an amateur attempt at history writing; all of these
hyphenated by cursory analysis. She carries on a conversation with the
reader and there is no attempt at political correctness. She is blunt and
revels in the uneasiness she stirs in the reader. The interesting part about
Manji is that she identifies herself as a Muslim in spite of having several
irreconcilable differences with Islam (her homosexuality being the biggest).
She chooses to criticise Islam while remaining a Muslim and writes that she
chose to stay within Islam because "…the imperative of identity kicked
in…Most of us aren't Muslims because we think about it, but rather because
we're born that way. It's who we are."

             Manji addresses several themes in her book, some ritualistic
and some geopolitical, but at the root of all these troubles she sees Islam
to be responsible and feels that the time has come for an Islamic
reformation to take place.

The most important issue that she raises when she talks about the rituals of
Islam is that whether Muslims all over the world are succumbing to a form of
'desert Islam' and coins a phrase 'foundamentalism' to describe this. By
desert Islam she means the sort of Islam practised by the Arabs. She writes,
"To parrot the desert peoples in clothing, in language, or in prayer is not
necessarily to follow the universal God." This harks of Naipaul who wrote in
the introduction to his book *Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the
Converted Peoples *that "Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone
not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of
conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert's
worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language
becomes Arabic. His idea of history alters."

She also writes that literalism is going worldwide in Islam and is
ideologically colonising Muslim minds. Legitimacy for every act for Muslims,
not only religious, but also political and social, (Islam doesn't
differentiate between the spiritual and the temporal realm) needs to be
derived from two sources, i.e., the Quran and the hadis. So when Manji is
asking Muslims to look beyond these two sources it contradicts one of the
fundamental beliefs of any Muslim.

She questions the perfection of the Quran calling it an ambiguous document
and writes that Muslims must begin to question the Quran and the *hadis*.
The Prophet was not an infallible man, she says, and thus his actions need
not be emulated. Historians of Islam have made these arguments before but
her casual manner will only incense Muslim fideists who believe in the
pristinity of the Quran and the infallibility of the Prophet.

            Manji forcefully calls for an Islamic reformation and says that
Ijtihad needs to be done for contemporary times. The first act of 'Operation
Ijtihad', as she calls it, should be that female Muslim entrepreneurs need
to be encouraged. She chooses this act of female entrepreneurship as the
first step in 'Operation Ijtihad' because she writes that "Muslims exhibit a
knack for degrading women and religious minorities." She chooses
entrepreneurship because "…Muslims have a centuries old affair with
commerce" and secondly "…there's no prohibition in the Quran against women
becoming businesspeople." There is no problem with the sentiment that female
entrepreneurs need to be encouraged and this could, in certain ways,
revitalise Muslim societies but is it so easy to practise ijtihad?

Ijtihad means the independent assessment of any issue based on the Quran,
sunna and fiqh literature and many Muslims (both Sunni and Shia belonging to
the recognised schools of Islamic jurisprudence) consider the gates of
ijtihad closed. Only a person who is highly qualified in Islamic
jurisprudence can practise ijtihad and while Manji may stridently call for
'Operation Ijtihad' ijtihad is not a common everyday occurrence in Islam.

            The next theme that she addresses is the stubborn streak of
Anti-Semitism that prevails among Islamic societies and she blames this on
two main reasons. One of these reasons is that Muslims are not aware of the
common religious linkages between the two faiths while the second reason is
that Palestine has become a global litmus test for Muslims to identify with
the *ummah*. The first reason is not convincing because for any Muslim who
is slightly familiar with his religion it is common knowledge that Islam was
a denouement of Judaism and Christianity and Mohammed was sent as the last
prophet because Jews and the Christians were not good religionists. Moses is
a highly respected prophet in Islamic hagiography and there are references
to Jews in the Quran.

The second reason where she talks about Palestine she indicts the Arab
states more for the plight of Palestinians than Israel. She seems to almost
exonerate Israel for the sorry state of Palestinians and accuses Arab states
of catalysing the conflict. It is true that the Arab states have had their
own self-interests and domestic causes to be propped up under the banner of
Palestine but can Israel be non-culpable? It seems funny to even pose the
question when we think of the fact that a country was created where none
existed before in 1948.

            The next theme that she addresses in her book is that Muslims
all over the world do not hate America because they perceive it to be
against Muslim interests but they hate America because, for them,
"Washington is the unrealised hope, not the lead criminal". And what is this
unrealised hope? It is the hope that America will bring democracy to Muslim
countries. She strongly endorses American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq
but sees them as jobs left incomplete. There has been a regime change bought
about by the Americans but now she wants them to make sure that they impose
their style of democracy so that Muslims are truly liberated. The fact that
America blatantly invaded a sovereign nation on the basis of false evidence
doesn't even merit one sentence.

She is convinced that Muslims love America simply because there is no
rejection of American culture in the Middle East. Muslims are desperate to
get on the local version of the show *Who Wants to be a Millionaire *and
Saudi Arabian women buy raunchy lingerie. If Manji is following the protests
over the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed all over the world, when Pakistani
Muslims burn the American flag even though America has nothing to do with
the cartoons, is it a sign that they want to be invaded in the hope that
true democracy can be imposed?

            Another theme that Manji touches upon is of Islam and slavery.
She quotes verses from the Quran to demonstrate Islam's laxity when it comes
to the question of slavery. I wonder how she overlooked the fact that one of
the first converts to Islam was an Abyssinan slave, Bilal, who was impressed
by Mohammed's message of equality and embraced Islam. He was Islam's first
muezzin, no lowly post.

            There are several other jarring issues that she raises in her
book. Suicide bombers come in for her prejudiced scrutiny but she chooses to
focus on the hackneyed seventy virgins theme that has become a choice
ridicule of Muslims while ignoring the desperate situations that lead young
men, sometimes not religious at all, to strap themselves with bombs and blow
themselves up. She doesn't talk about female suicide bombers and we can be
sure that they don't blow themselves up because of the seventy virgins in
paradise.

            Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are dismissed summarily by Manji.
She writes that Edward Said whose book Orientalism became such a rage all
over the world needs to rethink his theory because his book was distributed
by the west. Noam Chomsky also gets his one line dismissal when she writes
that it is not the west but Muslims who 'manufacture consent' in Allah's
name.

Manji imagines herself to be a pioneer, a mild revolutionary who is intent
on reforming Islam. I did find myself nodding to many of the things that she
had written when it came to the ritual aspects of Islam. I remember when I
was a little child I learnt by rote many verses of the Quran in Arabic
without remotely knowing what they meant. I also felt sad that our dog
couldn't come inside our house because he was considered an unclean animal
and many fellow Muslims disapproved of it. I'm also dismayed that most
Muslims in India look up to the clerics who have been trained in Islamic
seminaries that still follow a syllabus based on the Dars-i-Nizami, an
outdated syllabus (The syllabus originally consisted of 79 books written
between ninth and eighteenth centuries and does not have any Western
philosophical text in it)

But many of her arguments are simply not tenable and she makes one factual
error when she writes that it is not possible to know the chronology of the
revelation of the Quranic verses. It is possible to find out which verses of
the Quran were revealed in Mecca and which ones at Medina. Manji should have
done more academic research and relied less on anecdotes. Anecdotes are the
paraphernalia of a good writer but are subjective and the reliance on
anecdotes gives portions of the book an air of a pamphlet. There are faint
ripples for reform being heard all over the Muslim world today but Manji's
book will not turn these ripples into waves.
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