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Book Review:
“The Trouble with Islam” by Irshad Manji
Category: Politics
Posted: Saturday, November 22, 2008
by Mohammad Z. Iqbal
November 13, 2008
The geo-political events of the last few decades and especially the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath have put Muslims and Islam in the spotlight. While attempts have been made by many Muslims and non-Muslims to understand these events in their political context, others have attempted to link these events with the religion of Islam itself, and have taken this opportunity to denigrate Islamic tenets and history and have called for a “reformation” of the religion. Although the list of organizations and people working to defame Islam is long, the Canadian journalist and author, Irshad Manji has attracted particular attention. She published a book titled The Trouble with Islam, in 2003 and republished it 2004 with an opportunistically reworded title The Trouble with Islam Today. Her status as a self-proclaimed Muslim woman and her contempt for everything that Muslims hold dear, including the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad, struck a chord with like-minded organizations. While the original book is more than 4 years old now and has been adequately reviewed by both Muslim and non-Muslim critics, Manji continues to regurgitate her original work in the form of newspaper articles and blogs, and continues to use the flawed ideas put forth in her book to spawn new efforts in an attempt to undermine the Islamic faith. It is, therefore, relevant and useful to present a critical review of her book and provide a summary of how other critics view her work.
Since its publication, The Trouble with Islam has received its share of both praise and criticism. But one thing all critics agree on is that this book does not present a scholarly discussion on Islam, its legal framework or its history. While expressing his apparent joy at “assailing fundamentalist Islam”, Andrew Sullivan of New York Times acknowledges that Manji’s work “isn't the most learned or scholarly treatise on the history or theology of Islam; its dabbling in geopolitics is haphazard and a little naïve; its rhetorical hyperbole can sometimes seem a mite attention-seeking.”[1] A well-known anti-Muslim blogger Fjordman writes that “the best thing I can say about her book is that Manji is incoherent and vague.”[2] “In Irshad Manji's binary world, there are only two types of Muslims - those that agree with her views and the jihadists. But many Muslims simply disagree with her because they find her scholarship lacking, her tone derogatory and the timing of her book opportunistic.” [3]
What the book presents is an attempt by a journalist to use various current stereotypical views about Islam and Muslims to create controversy and generate interest in her book. The book mingles diverse and often unrelated topics such as women’s rights, political conflicts, Arab nationalism, terrorism, and religious laws to portray a picture of the religion that asserts that everything improper a Muslim does is directly influenced by the legal framework of Islamic rather than by personal, national, historical, and cultural factors. However, while addressing topics as complex as religious laws and history, Manji’s effort is superficial, simplistic and devoid of useful arguments.
“In her opening chapter, Irshad Manji lays out the premise of her book: “Prophet Muhammad … said that religion is the way we conduct ourselves towards others—not theoretically, but actually. By that standard, how Muslims behave is Islam.” The remainder of the book is a collage of Muslims behaving badly. In the author’s view, the problem is thus with Islam and, by corollary, its prime source, the Qur’an.”[4]
Continuing her theme of drawing on stereotypes, Manji details her interactions with her male Muslim teacher in Canada as a 13-year old inquisitive student. Never mind the fact that Islam does not have an organized structure or religious titles, for Manji the madrassa teacher is the face of Islam, strict, unquestionable, and paternalistic. Sullivan describes it as “one anecdote in this bracing little book that still makes me crack a smile long after reading it”.[5] What a bad teacher may have to do with Islam is beyond comprehension, but it does resonate with those who want to see Islam as a male-dominated religion that is afraid of women and unable to stand up to scrutiny by even a 13-year old.
The main purpose of the book appears to be an attempt to reformat Islam so it fits the practice and wishes of the author and her like-minded supporters. She wants to return Islam to its “clever, fun-loving roots.” In her attempts to redefine Islam, she relies heavily on the actions of some present day Muslims and the social and political problems that afflict them; and then picks and chooses texts from the Qur’an to claim a link between their actions and the Qur’anic text. Hence, she asserts, Islam needs to be reformed. She claims to draw her mandate for Islamic reformation directly from God’s injunction in the Qur’an that asks Muslims to reflect and think. “Qur’an has three times as many verses calling on Muslims to think, reflect, and analyze than verses that preach what’s absolutely right or wrong,” she claims repeatedly. She, of course, chooses to ignore the context that when God asks Muslims to reflect and think in the Qur’an, it generally follows a command by God and reflection and thinking on that command can help them understand the logic of divine laws. She, on the other hand, uses her assertion that God prefers Muslims to think and reflect, as an opportunity for Muslims to find a way to subvert God’s own laws.
Manji says that she does not claim to be qualified to engage in the legal practice Ijtihad nor is she asking other untrained Muslims to do so. She says she simply wants Muslims to think. This seems to be a tongue-in-cheek humility because her work is replete with attempts to redefine and re-invent Islam in areas in which she exhibits utter lack of knowledge and shows no desire to conduct basic research. “Manji’s convoluted methodology of interpretation is repeated throughout the book. She frequently relies on unreliable translations of Qur’anic verses, disregards context and shows no interest in probing deeper.”[6]
She also manages to see the 20th century political conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a reflection of centuries of anti-Semitism first prescribed in the Qur’an and then encouraged by the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) and his companions. Yet, other than referencing academically discredited or unidentified authors she presents no reliable Islamic sources for her conclusions. On the issue of anti-Semitism, she bases her argument on “the academically ambiguous pseudonym by the name of Ba’at Ye’or, whose work appeared coincidentally at the time of the Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims. According to Ye’or, Muslims have never treated non-Muslims fairly, in their entire history spanning 14 centuries and three Continents” .[7]
Overlooking the apparent disconnect between Islam as a religion and what is happening in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Manji’s limited and one-sided views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue appear to be based on a trip she took to Israel, during which she conveniently ignored to visit Palestinian territories or to meet with Palestinians to attempt to understand the political issues. According to Linda Belanger, a Canadian Human Rights activist, “by page 30 of her book, Manji starts to sound like the pro-war, pro-Zionist, Islam bashing columnists from the pages of Canwest Global newspapers, and at times I wondered if the book had been co-written with Daniel Pipes” .[8]
Given her clear dissatisfaction with the basic fundamentals of the religion, one is left to wonder why Manji continues her claim to be a Muslim. She believes that Qur’an is a “complex, contradictory, human[9]” book. She says she is “willing to take that leap of faith” that the Qur’an is “divinely inspired” but that the Qur’an contains “anti-female” verses and professes violence against non-Muslims. “I do not pray in the conventional muslim way,” she writes in her book. “I did that until my mid-twenties but I realized that this was nothing more than an insignificant ritual.” She complains about the Qur’an’s “ambiguities, inconsistencies, and outright contradictions and the possibility of human editing” without acknowledging that her perceptions are not based on a foundation of knowledge or any scholarly research.
Manji appears to use Islam as a prop in her attempt to pretend an insider view and to achieve notoriety. She is perhaps a more brilliant business woman and journalist than some of her peers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan. Both Ali and Sultan, while similar to Manji in their lack of scholarly intellect, chose to leave Islam. Both Ali and Sultan have written extensively against Islam and Muslims but with less commercial and media success than Manji. It appears that Manji realized that she would be more believable and appear more controversial to her non-Muslim audience if she continued to claim Islam as her religion while questioning everything within it, including the Qur’an.
Following the publication of her book, she has focused on portraying herself as the brave woman willing to fight a patriarchic religion. She claims that her her struggle has resulted in her receiving daily death threats and has forced her to live in a house with bullet-proof windows[10]. The fact that she is able to travel freely around the world, including Muslim countries, delivering lectures to anyone who is willing to listen leads one to question how much of this persona of a victimized woman has been fabricated to generate sympathy for her and increase sales of her book.
The only thing Manji has accomplished by writing The Trouble with Islam is to prove her brilliance at writing a commercially successful book that plays on the fears of the uninformed and the prejudices of the biased. As Sheema Khan points out “Muslims who are secure in their faith are not threatened by The Trouble with Islam. It is mildly annoying and downright irrelevant, for they are confident of dealing with contemporary issues within the timeless framework of the Qur’an. A book like this does, however, affect Muslims’ daily lives, because it spreads so much false information about the faith, which in the post-9/11 era heightens the polarization between civilizations.”[11]
It is a fact that Muslims need to better understand their religion, its history, and its traditions if they are to address the myriad social and political issues afflicting Muslim countries. It is true, as Manji points out in her book, that Muslim countries have often used alleged conspiracies by Israel and the Western countries as scapegoats for their own failures. It is also true that some extremists have used the Qur’an to incite violence and hatred towards non-Muslims. But Muslims who want to renew their faith or looking to their religion to find solutions to their present issues, or non-Muslims who want to understand Islam will not benefit from reading The Trouble with Islam. It appears that Manji does as good a job of misinterpreting the Qur’an to suit her own agenda as the Muslim extremists do.
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1. Sullivan, A. 2004. Decent Exposure. New York Times. January 25, 2004.
2. http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com
3. Chanda, N. 2004. www.caircan.ca.
4. Khan, S. 2003. Literary Review of Canada, Volume 11, No. 10, December 2003.
5. Sullivan, A. 2004.
6. Khan S. 2003
7. Khan, S. 2003.
8. Belanger, L. 2005. www.canpalnet-ottawa.org.
9. Sullivan, A. 2004.
10. Manji, I. 2008. Living my faith without fear. The Philadelphia Inquirer. 28 April, 2008.
11. Khan, S. 2003.