Muslim Refusenik

This interview originally aired on Free Forum with Terrence McNally on Los Angeles' KPFK radio.

At a moment when America is at war in a Muslim country due in part to the electoral muscle of the Christian Right, I agree with those who speak of a clash of civilizations. But I don't see Jews and Christians versus Muslims. I see fundamentalist, pre-scientific, pre-enlightenment Jews, Christians and Muslims versus Jews, Christians, Muslims and non-believers who, in their search for meaning, ask questions and question answers.

In her controversial best-seller, The Trouble with Islam Today, Irshad Manji, a spike-haired, lesbian Canadian who looks younger than her 36 years, challenges fellow Muslims to revive a lost tradition of free inquiry within Islam. The book has been published internationally, including in Pakistan, and Urdu and Arabic translations can be downloaded free of charge from her web site (www.muslim-refusenik.com.

Her earlier book, Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New Democracy, called on young people to re-define democracy through new technologies and social networks. Manji produced and hosted "Queer Television" on Toronto's Citytv, the first program on commercial airwaves to explore the lives of gay and lesbian people. She currently hosts "Big Ideas" in Toronto, featuring innovative thinkers from around the world.

Oprah Winfrey recently honored Irshad with the first annual Chutzpah Award for "audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction." Ms. magazine has selected her as a "Feminist for the 21st Century." Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine, named her one of ten "Canadians Who Make a Difference," and in June, she received the Simon Wiesenthal Award of Valor.

Terrence McNally: The Trouble with Islam Today grows out of your own life experience, doesn't it?

Irshad Manji: I think it's vital that I convey what my lived experiences are, because that's where the authenticity is, that's where the sincerity resides. My family and I are refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda. We settled just outside of Vancouver in 1972. I grew up attending two types of schools -- the public, secular school of most North American kids, and then on top of that, every Saturday for several hours at a stretch, the Islamic religious school, the madressa. That's where I regularly imbibed two major messages--that women are inferior, and that the Jews are treacherous, not to be trusted. Now Terry, I have never said, nor would I ever say, that every madressa teaches these things. How the hell would I know what every madressa teaches? I haven't been to every one of them, thank god for them as well as for me. But, even back then, at the age of eight, nine, ten, I had enough faith to ask questions, lots of them, and that's what got me in trouble.

As someone who went to Catholic school and did the same thing, I know what you mean (laughs).

(laughs) I can see the twinkle in your eye right now.

What kinds of questions did I ask? Questions like "Why can't girls lead prayer?" A question I know many Jewish and Christian women have wanted to ask of their own ayatollahs, and some have. I graduated, entirely metaphorically, to asking more sophisticated questions, like "If the Koran came to prophet Mohammed as a message of peace, then why, even after receiving that message, did he command his army to slay an entire Jewish tribe?"

Now you can appreciate that such questions irritated the hell out of my madressa teacher, who felt quite entitled to put down women and slog the Jews. So it's not surprising that he and I reached our ultimate impasse over yet another one of my annoying, ignorant questions.

At about what age?

At 14 I got booted out of the madressa, permanently. As I often have to remind my beleaguered mother, just because I left the madressa, mom, doesn't mean I left Allah. As a matter of fact, I had a crucial choice to make at this point. Sure, I could have walked away from Islam and got on with becoming a secular, materially-oriented North American, as many Muslims quietly do, or I could have given Islam another chance, and more importantly, asked Islam to give me another chance. Out of fairness to my faith ... I say "fairness" because maybe my madressa teacher was just a lousy educator. Why should my faith be punished for his shortcomings as a teacher? Out of fairness, I took time over the next 20 years to study Islam on my own when there were no interviews like this one, no spotlights, no journalists clamoring for commentary, no publishers approaching me, and no money to be made from the sale of books. In other words, I studied Islam with total and utter sincerity. I'm so pleased to say that as a result of all of that self-study, I came to discover a truly progressive side of my faith.