From the title of this book, you’d think it’s a replay of Ali-Karamali’s The Muslim Next Door from Sunday. And Manji and Ali-Karamali believe many of the same things, but Manji is an activist, and a reformer. Ali-Karamali has rather rose-colored glasses; she presents her beliefs as mainstream, and Muslims who say otherwise as in the small minority. Not so with Manji.
This book is actually a follow-up volume to her first book, The Trouble With Islam Today, which was published in 2005 and is no longer available at my local library, or even within the interlibrary loan system. I suppose I could actually suck it up an pay money for a kindle version, but she gives a synopsis of that first book in this one, published in 2011. The original book was something of a diagnosis, of what she saw in the state of the Islamic world in those post-9/11 years that needed reform. Read in isolation, it might have been hard to judge the extent to which she was giving a true picture. Her new book describes how the first book was received, and aims to be a call to action for fellow Muslims.
Her basic premise is that Islam needs to return to a “spirit of ijtihad” –“Islam’s own tradition of dissenting, reasoning, and reinterpreting.” (p. xvi). This tradition existed from the 9th to the 12th centuries in the Islamic Empire, or more specifically, in Muslim-controlled Spain, where “some 135 schools of Islamic interpretation thrived” (p. 26), until in the 12th century, “Muslim fanatics from Morocco. . . colonized Spain” and “within a few generations the gates of ijtihad narrowed” and “out of 135 schools of Sunni thought, only four survived — each of them more or less orthodox. The demise of critical thinking legitimized rigid readings of the Qur’an.” (p. 26)
Since publishing her book, she has travelled and lectured, produced a documentary, and has been active via a website and facebook, interacting with supporters and opponents alike. And, to be honest, far too much of her book is taken up with e-mails she’s received and her replies — which certainly does help establish that “mainstream Islam” is not the blissfully tolerant world that Ali-Karamali portrays. She tells of a screening of her documentary in Detroit, with an angry audience, and with young girls staying back to voice their support, but afraid to do so publicly, saying “Our families are here. We would be accused of dishonoring them” (p. 69). She writes of the imam at her mother’s mosque delivering a sermon in which she was called a “‘bigger criminal’ than Osama bin Laden.” (p. 47). She writes of the Muslim chaplain at Harvard justifying capital punishment for apostasy, and that the Muslim students at the university who condemned him in the student paper requested anonymity out of fear for the reaction of the rest of their community (p. 73 – 74).
She also lays out an agenda, under the theme of “moral courage” (which, by the way, she has turned into an enterprise, with logo’d clothing — an upside-down R, for some reason, at her website). This includes rejecting relativism, or the fear of criticizing other cultures, as well as group identity-motivated fears of criticizing one’s own culture. She gives examples of western judges accepting mistreatment of women among Muslim immigrants by shrugging it off as “it’s their culture.” She tells of an incident in which an Egyptian immigrant woman in Quebec insisted on wearing a veil to her French-language class, and was ultimately expelled because she couldn’t be properly graded on pronunciation with a veil, and says the answer in such a situation is to simply say, “veiling isn’t a part of Islam, it’s a tribalist practice which I don’t have to accommodate.” She addresses the issue of honor killing, and calls on, not just Muslims, but everyone, to oppose it rather than saying “not my problem.”
She profiles supporters, and encouraging signs such as the pushback, in Indonesia, against Saudi-backed extremist Muslims, and tells the story of Pakistan’s “Gandhi,” Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who, in the years preceding independence from Britain, encouraged education for girls, and opposed veiling and the “honor-drenched” culture. But she also raises the issue of Muslims who claim to be “moderate” but, when it comes down to it, won’t take a stand for justice.
As an added bonus, she describes a protest at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., in February 2010, which women prayed in the men’s part of the mosque in protest of the separation of the women and their relegation to basements and other inferior places. And the protest leader’s name sounded familiar: Asra Nomani, who happened to pop up in today’s Washington Post with a article saying, “As Muslim women, we actually ask you not to wear the ‘hijab’ in the name of interfaith solidarity,” which insists, with extensive background and explanation, that Muslim women are under no obligation whatsoever to cover their hair, and urges:
In the name of “interfaith,” these well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity” and unwittingly pushing a platform to put a hijab on every woman.
Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.
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