Waiting For Fatwa

In a recent article Fading Exclamations I had written “Osama a Muslim hero or villain: a pied piper or puppet: a rebel, an idealist or an agent? Whoever he maybe he is the best thing to happen to Islam.

He has forced the Muslims around the globe to rethink their religion. He has unwittingly provided a synergetic impetus.

Is Islam a religion of peace or violence? Do Muslims support suicide bombing. Does Islam unjustly favours men? How to loosen the Muslim pseudo-scholar’s grip. How to be tolerant of other religions? How to live and let live?

In re-thinking these queries perhaps lies our and Islam’s resurgence and salvation.”

Let me confess I had no premonition about this book The Trouble with Islam by Irshad Manji that was released in Canada yesterday.
Irshad Manji, 34/35 years old is of Indian extraction. Her Indian parents were shown the door by the recently deceased Idi Amin from Uganda in 1972. They settled in British Columbia. She went to school and university there, winning awards and scholarships on the way. At 23 she became one of the youngest editorial writer at the Ottawa Citizen.

“Ms. Magazine has named her a “Feminist for the 21st Century” and Maclean’s, Canada’s national news magazine, has chosen her as one of 100 “Leaders for Tomorrow.” The category they put her in? “Dreamer.” She takes that as a compliment.”

“Currently, Irshad is President of VERB, a TV channel being developed to engage young people on issues of global diversity. She also hosts Big Ideas, TVOntario’s weekly show aimed at college and university students. That’s fitting, since Irshad also serves as Writer-in-Residence at Hart House, University of Toronto.”

On the book released yesterday Trouble with Islam, she says “As I see it, the trouble with Islam is that individual lives are too small and the lies we tell to excuse that fact are too big. Neither has to be the case under a compassionate and merciful God, as Muslims like to describe Allah. The Trouble with Islam, then, is a plea for all of us, as citizens of the world, to help Islam fulfill its glorious humanitarian potential, so that we all gain in diversity, dignity and security.

At the beginning of my book, I call myself a "Muslim Refusenik". That doesn’t mean I refuse to be a Muslim; it means that I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of God.

In that spirit, I’m asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place?
My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called "racists," or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?

The Trouble with Islam is a wake-up call for honesty and change on everybody’s part. Through the book and this website, let’s create conversations where none existed before.

Michael Posner reviewing the book in today’s Globe and Mail quotes her as saying:

"I’m not asking Muslims to do something outside of our tradition," she insists. "Just the opposite: I’m trying to help revive ijtihad, Islam’s lost tradition of independent thinking. And this opportunity to rediscover ijtihad is especially available to Muslims in the West, because it’s here that we already enjoy precious freedoms to challenge and be challenged, without fear of state reprisal. What I’m trying to do is promote tolerance. To get there, I and a critical mass of my fellow Muslims need to confront the intolerance that’s percolating in our own ranks."

Leslie Scrivener of the Toronto Star says, “Call her crazy or call her courageous, Toronto journalist Irshad Manji is calling for reform in Islam — targeting what she calls its oppression of women, its tribalism and its attitudes toward Jews.” And “Manji is a practising Muslim who observes the month-long fast at Ramadan and prays daily, though no longer in the proscribed times and style mandated by the faith. “When it becomes rote, a ritual, it easily translates into submissiveness. Discipline is one thing, but when it becomes mindless — am I truly conscious of communicating with my Creator?" she writes.”

I hope to read the book soon. I would read her with an open mind and would urge you to do the same. But from all that I have read about it so far I fear that a fatwa is in the offing from those who read not. But as Salman Rushdie advised her, “a book is more important than life.”

If those fears come true, I hope the silent amidst you would shake off your lethargy and raise your voice in your local media against forces of decay and regression, against forces of violence and intolerance, against forces of gross misinterpretation. Do not be distracted by those who would deflect and criticize her lifestyle. Judge her on what she has written.