TEHELKA: Irshad Manji walks a dangerous path, claiming her right as a believer to criticise and interpret Islam. SALIL TRIPATHI talks to her after the release of her new film
Irshad Manji moved to Canada when she was four, a refugee from the tyranny of Idi Amin's Uganda, when Asians were given sixty days to pack up and leave the country. The daughter of an Indian father and an Egyptian mother, Manji settled into her new home, her family seeking the migrant's comfort from the familiar certainties of the community and the faith.
But Manji was a spunky child (and now she is a spunky adult), and she was quick to notice the contrast between her secular, public school, and the religious madrasa which she attended on weekends. Early in her controversial best-seller, "The Trouble With Islam Today," she notices a contrast. A senior teacher disapproves of her locker displaying stickers supporting the Ayatollah's revolution in Iran. He bristles at her insubordination, but does not stop her, or discipline her, grudgingly respecting her right to defy. And then there is the religious teacher, who sternly admonishes her each time she questions particular religious passages that bother her. Hers was not to reason why; hers but to obey and cry. Or else.
When Manji persisted, wanting to know more about a class in which the teacher cites particularly venomous passages criticising the Jews, and insisted on seeing the original text, she was admonished. The mosque had a library but it was accessible only in one part of the mosque (which was of course segregated between men and women) and as she had passed the age of puberty – she had just entered her teens – she could go to the library only at particular hours, after the men present there had vacated the area. And there, she found books in an alien tongue, and an undecipherable script.
She continued to question, and her teacher gave her an ultimatum – accept his command or leave. And she left, seeking refuge yet again in her life, this time in a public library. There, she found an English translation of the Koran, and as she read more into the book, she also came across a concept that her teacher never mentioned. And as she was to discover later in life, it was not only that teacher who denied the existence of that term; so did, it seems, most maulvis and imams and scholars who spoke in the name of Islam.
It was the concept of ijtihad, a term that means you arrive at an independent interpretation of the faith, applying reason. It means yanking Islam from the 7th century to the 21st, fast-forwarding it, making it relevant in present times, removing it from the siege mentality that views the non-believer as an enemy, dividing the world between the unbeliever and the apostate, treating the words in a book as divinely-ordained, and putting to sword anyone who challenges its supremacy. "What was relevant a thousand years ago is no longer relevant today," she says disarmingly.
She is in London promoting her film, "Faith without Fear," about her quest to capture the essence of Islam. She is a senior scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy, and writes extensively on Islam and modernity. At the New York University, she is launching a new project on moral courage, where, she says, her inspiration is the non-violent civil disobedience and passive resistance of Mohandas Gandhi. The Trouble with Manji >>>
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