Irshad Manji is Realistic - Yet Hopeful - About Her Faith

Irshad Manji, the author of Allah, Liberty and Love, came highly recommended for this program by Fox News Anchor Jenna Lee. Feeling the pressure to live up to her “good friend” Jenna’s praise, Manji began her first ever appearance with Imus by explaining The Trouble with Islam Today, the title of her previous book.
 
“The trouble with Islam today is us Muslims,” Manji said. “I realize that might sound incendiary to some ears, but Muslims themselves will be the first to acknowledge…it is we Muslims who are keeping it in a 7^th century, tribal time warp.”
 
Rather than blame the extremists who are overtly perverting Islam, Manji, a professor at NYU, takes issue with moderate Muslims, calling them “part of the problem, not part of the solution.” She quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who, during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, called moderation in times of moral crisis “a cop out” because it preserves the status quo.
 
“The same should be said about what is happening within Islam today,” Manji said. “What we need in Islam is not more moderates. We need more reformists.”
 
To Imus’s suggestion that some Muslims might be scared to speak out, Manji noted it is neither death nor violence they fear. “They’re afraid of being disapproved by their own community,” she said, and of “losing their identity.” She encouraged Muslims to focus on their integrity and their conscience, and to be honest with God in that way above any other.
 
It is difficult to enumerate how many Muslims secretly sympathize with the sentiments of Al-Qaeda, so instead Manji took a more positive approach, recalling that when The Trouble with Islam Today first came out, she received many requests from young Muslims in the Middle East to have the book translated and published in Arabic. Knowing no Arab publisher would do so, she followed the advice of her fans and made the book available on her website in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi.
 
“We’ve had more then two million downloads,” she told Imus, adding, “I hope that actually shows there’s a real hunger for how to reconcile faith and freedom within the world of Islam.”
 
Manji believes a good deal of anger in the Arab world, at least politically and rhetorically, is about America’s support of Israel.  “Many Muslims have said, ‘Irshad, if that issue just got resolved…everything would be just fine,’” she said. “And I remind them that that’s simply not true—that anti-Semitism has run rampant within our religion well before the Jewish state of Israel was created.”
 
She admonished her fellow Muslims for blaming the outside world for all of their ills. “We’ve got to cop to our own crap,” she added.
 
Signs of progress can be seen in this year’s Arab Spring, which has, in Manji’s view, provided hope. “Democracy is a process, and not a result, and it takes a lot of courage over a couple of centuries in order to arrive at points like the U.S. has,” she said, and shared with Imus the plight of a young Muslim woman who, in Cairo in 2005, told Manji she was in love with a Jewish man, and didn’t know how to tell her parents.
 
“This is a generation of pluralists, of people who love diversity,” Manji continued. “They are the ones we have to keep our eye on, not the older folks who may still be stuck in some tribal ways. This is a new generation, and that’s what Allah, Liberty, and Love is all about.”
 
Impressed by his guest’s first go-round, Imus declared Jenna Lee had been right. Smiling, Manji said, “She always is.”
 
-Julie Kanfer