May 22, 2009

 

 

Irshad Manji’s ‘The Trouble with Islam Today’

Irshad Manji, author of the book under the above title, has been called a heretic, a self-despising person, an Islamophobic out to wage a vendetta on the faith she was born into. Yet, the 216-page book is compelling, riveting and thought provoking, despite being no highbrow work of history or scholarship.

It is as intriguing as the author herself. Take her very name, Irshad, for instance. This is the first time to my knowledge at least that a Muslim girl has been given the name of a boy. She calls it a ‘unisex’ name - she ought to know, it is her name. Then, she is a Lesbian and makes no bones about it. “God has made me and only God can unravel me”, she contends.

Manji, 41, has earned repute as an experienced journalist, a lecturer much in demand and a devout human rights fighter. She is the winner of numerous awards including Oprah Winfrey’s Chutzpah Award for courage, verve and conviction, and Simon Wiesenthal Award for valor. She has been hosting a TV program dealing with the issues of gays and lesbians titled Queer TV as well as the program Big Ideas.

Born in Uganda to a martinet Indian father and a soft and considerate Egyptian mother, both Muslims, Irshad arrived in Richmond, B.C., Canada in 1972 along with her parents who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. She was just four years of age. She was a student leader at school and in college. And, her parents sent her to a Muslim madarsa attached to a mosque for several years to enable her to be educated in the religion of her family.

That is where her confusion and conflict began. Her teacher, evidently an honorary worker not well versed in religion, was unable to satisfy her questioning mind. Following the ‘my way or the highway’ dogma, he made her quit the class. But she continued to study Islam on her own, by borrowing books from a library, for some 20 years. Naturally, she had no opportunity to learn Arabic and she had to depend on the works of orientalists; a list of the books is given on her website (WWW.Muslim-Refusenik.com) and at the end of her book.

In a way it is advantageous that her thoughts did not get steeped into the plethora of literature on Islam produced during the period 750-1492, the golden period of Islam’s intellectual, material and scientific attainments. She has computed this period to be 500 years, from750 to 1250, but I think the momentum continued, though it was tapering off till the fall of Spain in 1492 that also marks the discovery of America.

She attributes most of the troubles of the Muslim world to the drying up of the spirit of enquiry, Ijtehad, by Muslim religious leaders in the 12 th century and those who have followed in their footsteps. The door of Ijtehad was shut to do away with the hundreds of different schools of thought that had cropped up creating a cacophony of dissident voices. Then, the mystics and Sufis established their own cadres adhering to mysterious rituals. Yet, as Manji has pointed out, the end of Ijtehad marked the end of the dialectics of debates, discussions, syntheses and consensus. Islam went into a hermitage.

The spirit of enquiry, the distinctive feature of the Muslim intellectual life was picked up by Christian reformers, Martin Luther, Calvin and others. Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, growth of pure and applied sciences generated fast forward march of Europe. Muslim empires of Turkey, Iran and India commenced their slide down till their territories and resources were taken over by Western colonialism and enterprise.

The muzzle over innovation imposed by the mullahs, the clergy, was so severe that an observatory set up in Istanbul in 1579 was demolished a year later. The great Ottoman Empire continued in intellectual darkness for two more centuries when a printing press in Istanbul was closed in 1745! Printing press was an innovation, hence unacceptable to the clergy. What a plunge from a few centuries before, points out the author, when Islam led the world in astronomy, math, medicine, and more.

Manji attribute many of the faults of Muslim communities in various parts of the world to the emergence of Wahabism in the mid-18 th century in collaboration with the house of Saud. She calls it Fundamentalism and Desert Islam. She does not mention the positive attainments of Wahabism – a puritan form of religion free of ancestor and grave worship and Sufi practices and sects. The concept that the 32-year period of the four Caliphs who followed the prophet, marked the golden era of Islam, is open to question. Three of the four Caliphs were assassinated and by Muslims, and the entire period is too short to serve as the role model for generations to follow. But that kept the focus of the worldwide Muslim community on practices followed by Saudi Arabia. “When people are indoctrinated to believe that any aspect of the founding moment is sacred”, argues Nanji “then the faith is destined to become static, brittle, inhumane”. Arab culture needs to be separated from Islam as a faith, she maintains.

Manji is right in her argument that the Muslims have to throw open the door of Ijtehad, instead of remaining confined to their own cocoons of tribal practices, superstitions and unquestioning following of rituals. A radical reformer, she questions refreshingly the prevalent concepts, provoking thought and exercising logic. She eggs on Muslims to do a lot of introspection. Her tone is urgent, insistent and unmodulated to the point of being tedious at times. She is unhappy over the erosion of intellectual curiosity among Muslims for so many centuries.

She has launched a project for introducing Ijtehad into the body politics of Muslim societies. A Foundation has been set up to enable Muslim youth to get together and exchange views – a cross fertilization of concepts.

She is also working on measures to empower rural women through micro loans. This too appears to be making headway. In Muslim countries a good number of women are in the field now for securing the rights of women and fighting against tribal and other traditions suppressing women. The devaluation of women is not peculiar to Muslim societies only. Matter of fact, Islam liberated women of Arabia. For centuries the Chinese used to tie the feet of young girls in wooden shoes so that they grew up as physically handicapped women to remain dependent on their husbands and other men of the family for the rest of their lives. I have a vivid recollection of such Chinese ladies whom I used to see as a young boy in the mid-1930s.

In Hindu society, the custom of Satti obligated the widow to burn alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. That means the wife had no identity separate from that of her husband. In Arabia female babies were buried alive till Prophet Muhammad banned the custom. And, in Europe, women were burnt alive on suspicion of being witches. In the Roman Empire a woman, like a slave, was treated like property.

Enlightenment and progress have gradually eliminated all these customs. Change for the better can be witnessed now everywhere. In some Muslim societies, however, there is still the tradition of honor killings, bias against homosexuals, defining rape victims as adulteresses, and punishing adulteresses by stoning. But there is a strong aversion building up towards these. And, laws are being framed to eliminate such malpractices.

Irshad Manji need not be over-aggressive about these, as these practices too would follow Satti and foot-tying practices. One may disagree with the author on certain points, but it is a book worth reading and mulling over, particularly because of the emergence of Taliban who preach and practice concepts that are in conflict with the demands of modern times and militate against the basic tenet of tolerance emphasized by the prophet of Islam.

arifhussaini@hotmail.com