THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM:
A Wake Up Call for Honesty and Change.
by Irshad Manji
reviewed by Steve Booth
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Can Islam cope with the challenge of modernity? Could it update? or is Islam
beyond reform, irretrievable doomed to isolation, violence, poverty, backwardness,
failure and inflexible dogmatism?
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Irshad Manji was born in 1968, and grew
up in Canada, she calls herself a 'Muslim Refusenik'. as a child, she was
sent to Madressa, Islamic school. Boys and girls were rigidly segregated,
questioning the faith was not permitted. Children were made to recite the
Koran in Arabic, without understanding. Only 13% of Muslims are Arab, 87%
are not. Trying to access the Madressa's library fell foul of the sexual
segregation law, so Irshad sought the answers to her questions in bookshops
and the pre-internet public library. Why was Islam so anti Jewish? Her questions
only brought her expulsion.
Salman Rushdie and Edward Said were intellectual influences. Questioning
Islam put her outside the pale, being homosexual made her doubly an outsider.
In Irshad's mind, the pluralistic, liberal, modern Canadian society clashed
with unquestioning, unthinking Islam. She obtained an English translation
of the Koran, and began to discover its many contradictions. Why are women
supposedly honoured, yet treated like dirt? Why was a raped 17 year old
Nigerian woman sentenced to 180 lashes? Why are Iranian lesbians buried
in pits up to the neck and then stoned? Islam is merciless and intolerant.
As to the seventy virgins promised to Islamic suicide bombers and 11th September
hijackers, there is a possibility that the Koranic verse is mistranslated
from an earlier text, and that the word for 'virgin' could really be 'raisin'.
On p 63, she discovers the concept of 'ijtihad' or independent reasoning,
which drove early Islamic science, of people like Ibn Rushd (Averroes) but
then the Islamic mind closed down in the rigid, legalistic dogmatism of
Sharia. 'Dhimmitude' is a word coined to describe the Islamic suppression
of Christians and Jews, forcing them to wear yellow symbols of monkeys and
pigs. She describes a visit to Israel, contrasting Israeli openness, prosperity,
free speech, democracy with Palestinian corruption, violence, herd mentality
and victimhood. Millions of dollars of aid have been sent to Palestine,
much of it squandered by Yosser Arafat and his cronies. [p97] She tries
to go to the Dome of the Rock but is harassed by Islamic authorities. After
leaving Israel in 1948, many Palestinians are still refugees, living in
camps - another aspect of Muslim 'victimhood'. Irshad opens up some skeletons
in the Islamic cupboard, like the Mufti of Jerusalem. He terrorised Palestinians,
forced back Jewish refugees fleeing from the Holocaust, supported Hitler,
recruited Balkan Muslims into the German Wehrmacht and SS, urging Muslims
to 'Kill the Jews wherever you find them' [Radio Berlin broadcast, 1st March
1944]
Muslims are schizophrenic in they both reject America, but also crave its
materialism and wealth. Islam has failed as a civil society. 'Muslims today
are the poorest, the most illiterate, the most unhealthy, the most unenlightened,
the most deprived, and the weakest of the human race'. [Perves Musharraf,
President of Pakistan] Saudi Arabian hegemony in the Islamic world is criticised.
American prosperity is dangled just before Muslims, tantalizingly out of
reach. Irshad has an answer and it has to do with liberating third world
women through micro-credit schemes. Small amounts of money are loaned to
women, to create their own rural businesses. With the increased trade comes
a steadily rising level of prosperity, which is reinvested in the local
economy. Through their participation in wealth creation, women discover
a greater sense of their own self worth. Other things like health care,
clean water supplies, and education follows. With the questions and answers,
the Fundamentalist grip is broken. Trade ties people together. The women
are set free from the male dominated, Sharia ruled society.
This book is the product of a clash between two cultures. On the one hand,
the Medieval Islamic world 'Where lives are small and lies are big'; and
the other modern culture, pluralistic, open and democratic. There is an
optimistic faith in the west, though some criticism is offered of George
W Bush's unwillingness to use aid to leverage in more human rights in the
Third World. She rejoices in pluralism, tolerance, questioning, difference.
The whole joyous tone is infectious. I am not convinced that the micro-credit
is the whole answer, though it is worth supporting, and has got to be a
whole lot better (and cheaper) than bombing people. She also calls for a
more sensitive and tightly focussed propaganda campaign directed against
Fundamentalism. I am not convinced that Islam could remain in existence
against such an assault from the west. The crisis of modernism Islam faces
here is similar to that faced by Christianity over the last 200 - 300 years.
Hume, Voltaire, D F Strauss, Darwin, Bultmann, Robinson, Don Cupit or David
Jenkins. Islam faces a similar assault from rationalism, science and Postmodernism.
In the face of this, there will be a tendency for it to shrink and become
more dogmatic.
I feel sure that orthodox Muslims would deny that Irshad is a Muslim. She
questions her own continued involvement in it, declining to leave on grounds
of fairness. She finds much that is positive in her self-identification
as a Muslim, but how much of this is a result of her own origins and culture,
what proportion of traditional Islamic belief and practice must she retain
to still be considered Muslim? - It is a Ship of Theseus type of problem.
This book is the product of an extremely healthy type of self questioning
and honesty. It doesn't pull back from exposing shibboleths and sclerotic
tribal thinking. It is written in a conversational style which readily draws
you in to its discussion and predicament. This book deserves the widest
possible readership.
– Email: Stephen Booth
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