Women's Work.

The Sunday Times (London) had a profile on Irshad Manji, "lipstick lesbian" and "Osama's worst nightmare."

Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award. Even at a conference in Oxford last week she felt unsafe — despite extra security — with police sifting through “disgusting e-mails” and threats after her appearance on Newsnight.

Doesn’t the violent Muslim minority show Islam is flawed? “I ask myself the same question,” she grimaces. Far from regarding Muslims as oppressed they have a “supremacy complex — and that’s dangerous”. This, she contends, is true even among moderates. “Literalists” who consider the Koran the “perfect manifesto of God” have taken over the mainstream; and far from misreading Islam, as Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain insist, terrorists can find encouragement for murder in the Koran.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare ”.

“The good news,” she insists, “is it doesn’t have to be like this.” She wants a reformation in Islam, returning it to its clever, fun-loving roots. “The world’s first ‘feminist’ was an 11th-century Muslim man. Baghdad had one of the first universities in the 9th century; the Spanish ‘Ole!’ comes from ‘Allah’; Islam even gave us the guitar.”

It is possibly significant that the two most articulate critics of radical Islam is Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dutch MP and collaborator of Theo van Gogh. We are the men?

Comments

[Hafsah]

I admire the fact that you take such a level headed approach to Islam and Islam related issues. People such as Irshad Manji and the media fuel the misconception fire of what Islam is really about.

“Doesn’t the violent Muslim minority show Islam is flawed? “I ask myself the same question,” she grimaces. Far from regarding Muslims as oppressed they have a “supremacy complex — and that’s dangerous”. This, she contends, is true even among moderates. “Literalists” who consider the Koran the “perfect manifesto of God” have taken over the mainstream; and far from misreading Islam, as Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain insist, terrorists can find encouragement for murder in the Koran.”

When people don’t understand the facts they tend to create misconceptions that are quite mediocre, and to me, simply a sign of personal ignorance. We bend towards Mecca solely to create order and discipline. Not because Saudi has oppressed us. Nobodies supreme in our culture. In the Quran the only way one can be supreme over another is through their actions, and the sincerity of one’s actions can only be judged by God. But of course; that too no one has bothered to look up.