I have read Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam Today (2003, postscript in paper pack edition 2005). Manji is a Canadian journalist. She is a Muslim, whose parents fled Uganda and landed in British Columbia. By her autobiographical testimony, she was a feisty, challenging, and intellectually curious child and teenager, who matured into a feisty, challenging, and intellectually curious professional journalist. She calls her hair "spikey", as the back cover photo indeed shows. Her mind is spikey, too.
Basically, Manji argues that Islam is fundamentally flawed as a religion and as a religiously-based way of life. Its flaws lead to intra-Muslim conflict, degradation of one Muslim sect by another, subjugation by an elite (desert sheikdom) class of the vast majority of Muslims, enslavement of Muslim women by men, abuse of children by men, conquest by Arabs of non-Arab Muslims, and conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims. Despite some historical periods when Islam tolerated the presence of Jews and Christians (as long as they paid their taxes, accepted second class status, and were deferential), Islam is a religion of elites preying upon others, including men preying upon women. It is a religious society operating on a paradigm of colonization and expropriation.
It is her analysis of the religion's basic flaw that interests me. I have argued (an argument not original with me) that Islam is not fundamentally a religion at all, but the ideology of a war state. She phrases the foundational moment of Islam somewhat differently. Muhammad was a conquerer and Arabs were a conquering--indeed, "colonizing"--people. "Islam" as a "revealed religion" was constructed by Muhammad and succeeding Caliphs to serve the aims of colonization of other Arabs and of non-Arabic societies. Manji writes, "It stands to reason that the Koran has imperfections. The rapidity of Arab empire-building would have crystallized priorities, making religion a servant of colonization and not the other way around" (p. 142).
Though Manji considers herself an apostate, she thinks there are good parts, so to speak, to Islam; it's founder borrowed much from ancient Judaism. The good bits are, alas, buried by Islamic foundationalism, that is, by the efforts to revive the purest form Muhammad's vision. The Jihadists stand in a long tradition of Islamic colonizers who deliberately suppress the good parts of Islam. It is worth while for Muslims, and for Westerners to help them, to liberate the good parts of Islam, because this reform would lead to the liberation of hundreds of millions of men and women whose lives are stunted and brutalized by the flaws of Islam. What Islam needs are its versions of the Protestant Reformation and the European eighteenth century Enlightenment. Manji's book is a powerful, compelling, and spikey demonstration of what an Islamic reformation and enlightenment would be like. She traverses the history of Islam and provides a critical analysis of contemporary Islam's self-delusions and politics of self-destruction that few Muslims outside the West ever hear.
The book is also a demonstration of the courage that would be required to emancipate Islam from its self-imposed Dark Ages. Manji is a courageous woman, but she has had to live with bodyguards since the publication of this work.
Recent Comments