"The Trouble with Islam"
Book review: Riad Saloojee
With the media spotlight on Islam, media entrepreneur Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam has hit a vein of publicity. Part autobiography, part call for Islamic reformation, the book's value falls short of its fanfare.
A personal narrative, the book begins with Manji’s childhood in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond. In both her community and private life, she experiences the disconnect of a young girl from the religious absolutism around her and learns both the pain and merit of asking questions.
As an adult writer, Manji problematizes much, and justly so: authoritarian structures within Muslim societies; shrunken spaces for women's dignity and participation; attitudes of victimization among many Muslims and a reluctance to engage in self-criticism.
Manji's questioning is not novel. Others, including contemporary Muslim thinkers, have grappled with the same issues. But the similarity ends there.
Far from a multi-dimensional analysis of Muslim malaise, Manji sets her sights unrelentingly on Islam. "Is Islam more narrow-minded than the rest of the world's religions?" she asks. If anything, one might expect a comparative exercise here; instead, her pointed conclusions on Islam are frequently proved by non sequiturs, reductive generalizations and kitschy anecdotes.
For example, she inquires: "Is Islam the uber-oppressor of creativity, dynamism and democracy?" while citing the case of Pakistan, which refused to allow one of its citizens to play on a doubles tennis team with an Israeli. The Israeli faced no similar restriction from his own country. "Surely," argues Manji, "this dichotomy has something to do with each nation's ethical compass," which is, "animated by each nation's religious values." Here Manji makes an unbelievable leap, from a politically motivated Pakistani tennis-team policy to a generalization about a religion’s impact on a society’s values.
Though she insists "on giving Islam a fair shake," her arguments about the Koran come with numerous flaws. Overlooking centuries of vigorous interpretive discussion, diversity and dialogue on the Koran (there are no references to any such scholarship; reading Manji you would think it non-existent), Manji seems to shop selectively for verses, divorcing them from both their context and mainstream interpretations. Without, it appears, any knowledge of Koranic hermeneutical criticism, she creates a caricature of Islam, projecting her own conclusions on the text much like, ironically, the literalism of Bin Laden.
Regarding Islam's alleged dark side – anti-Jewish sentiment, oppression of women, violence and slavery - Manji violates the premier rule of Koranic textual interpretation: that all verses on a subject are to be read together, contextually and coherently. One verse, revealed in one circumstance, might comment on a particular situation and should not be universalized.
In many instances, the Koranic critique of the Jewish community falls into this category: many Koranic passages address conflicts between the early Muslim and Jewish communities that were primarily political. But God is, in Arabic, al-'Adl, the Just, and numerous Islamic texts lay down moral absolutes, like justice and equity in dealing with all people. As well, historical examples of symbiosis and harmony are too numerous to premise Islam being anti-Jewish.
Manji makes similar mistakes when discussing women (Her interpretations are certainly not those shared by the ever-increasing number of educated Western women converting to Islam.) And, certainly, most mainstream Islamic scholars would differ with her portrayal of Koranic passages dealing with physical Jihad (as opposed to Jihad as a spiritual struggle) as providing a licence for violent acts against non-Muslims.
An oddity of the work is that although Manji accuses Muslims of using Israel as a lightening rod for their own malaise, much of the book is a sentimentalized apologetic for Israel. Sounding more like a publicist than a critical thinker when discussing Israel, the self-proclaimed I-pull-no-punches Manji is not recognizable.
Critical projects are best when infused with realism, refined analysis and love. Tareq Ramadan's To Be a European Muslim, and Noah Feldman's After Jihad are two fine examples.
By contrast, Manji's work, seemingly interested primarily in hamstringing traditional Islam, cripples itself by its profound failure to consider both centuries of Islamic scholarship and the many secular influences, both political and social, that have had a hand in shaping the Muslim world.
Justifies Manji: "I know I'm oversimplifying, but oversimplification runs rampant in the development of God-awful laws.” Unfortunately, her book suffers from the same flaw. Better had she heeded the words of Gandhi: Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Montreal Gazette, 4/10/2003