Thursday, August 16, 2007

Making sense of the Irshad Manjis Wake-up Call Title: The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-Up Call For Honesty And Change Author: Irshad Manji Pages: 254 Year: 2004 Publisher: Mainstream Publishing Company Ltd, Edinburgh. Reviewer: Arshad Amanullah ***** The revolutionary nature of the questions Irshad Manji raises in the under review volume, makes it a wake-up call for honesty and change though the way she argued, is characterized with a stunning naivet. It is her tendency to make sweeping statements, without marshalling convincing arguments, makes it an irritating reading. It perhaps springs from her ignorance of the classical texts produced by the Muslims as a part of their intellectual journey across millennia. Manjis narrative unfolds with the mention of the Richmond madrasa as an ideological space, one of the clichd themes of the contemporary writings on Islam. She, like other children of the Muslim immigrants, attended it which had no answers to the questions she asked about Islam and the place of women in it. Not long before, she realized that the focus was on indoctrination, rather the education. Out of her curiosity, she decided to circumvent the madrasa circle and became a mall-rat to find more meaning in her religion. Thus, the madrasa acted as a catalyst in propelling her to embark upon a journey to discover Islam. Manji critiques the Richmond madrasa curriculum which counts all pre-Islamic experience for naught. The South Asian madrasas are no exception to it. Jahiliyya is the term which is quite often used to refer to the pre-Islamic contributions to the societies and civilisations. Further, she advises the Muslims not to be steeped in anti-Semitism and in the same vein, describes the Jews as the debut monotheists. It is very strange on her part that she, despite her insistence on her Muslim identity, overlooks the contributions of the prophets and their peoples to the idea of monotheism who lived on this planet in the pre-Mosses era. A presenter of the Queer Television, Toronto, and an open lesbian, Manji very often comes across the demand to explain herself: How do you reconcile homosexuality with Islam? During her crusades to resolve this inconsistency between her spiritual and 1

physical identity, she has been exposed to many other disturbing questions regarding Islam and the Muslims. For example, the issue which left her perplexed while pondering over the different interpretations of the Quranic verse: Women are your fields. Go, then, into your fields when you please. Do good works and fear God, was: I know which interpretation I wanted but I didnt know for sure (and still dont) which one God wants. Her search for truth continues unabated as is reflected through her website (www.muslim-refusenik.com) and also in the large number of volumes she incorporated in her bibliography of this book. It betrays a slant towards the writings churned out by the western scribes. Thus, like many other authors of the third-world origin who are yet to go through the process of the cerebral decolonization, Manji too has succumbed to the irresistible temptation to heavily draw from the so-called western experts on the religions originated in the Orient, especially on Islam. This may be one of the reasons that she needed a person to introduce the tradition of ijtihad and Muslim Spain at towards such a later part of her life though her quest for the meaning of her Muslim identity started during her childhood . My hats are off to Manji for making an appeal to launch Operation Ijtihad. Sadly, the role she has scripted for America in actualizing this Operation places it in the domain of utopia. It will depend on America not only for the resources but also for dramatically choking off Saudi oil revenues to compel the King to terminate financial aid to the clerics and also for irrigating the desert with ideas and economic activity. As an ardent supporter of the tradition of ijtihad, she refuses to place herself within the four schools of jurisprudence. This very choice, on her part, brings her closer to the Wahhabism than she would have liked to be, an ideology which she lambasted on innumerable occasions in this book itself. I am surprised why she, a post-modern and a believer in multiplicity of Islamic traditions, fails to recognize variations within the Wahhabi cult. I respect Manjis inquisitive spirit and her right to ask questions although my only concern is whether is it not necessary for a truth-seeker to keep his/her facts correct. The historicity of the accounts she provides regarding Islams first schism, calls for reconsideration. Webbed to her passionate advocacy for invoking the tradition of ijtihad is her hope that Islam has still retained its appeal to the humanity. She does not agree with Taslima Nasrin of the Lajja fame who believes that replacement of the religious laws with civil ones i.e., the complete separation of mosque and state, is the only way to make reform possible in the Muslim societies. Manji thinks that Islam forms a pillar of identity for millions of women and, hence, taking religion out of the public sphere is more than unrealistic. However, she, like Nasrin, is concerned about the fact that one can not reaffirm the value of Islam without reinforcing its noxious air of supremacy. Putting her trip to Israel in the foreground, she discusses the Israel-Palestine quagmire at length. Interwoven through her observations, surfing of the newspapers and magazines like the Jerusalem Report and Haaretz, the New York Times of Israel, her visits to the

Dome of the Rock and the Al- Aqsa mosque as well as meeting with some intellectuals like Raja Shehadeh, her narrative provides glimpses of the political culture of Israel and its engagement with the Palestinian people and leaders. Shehadeh, the founder of the nonpartisan human rights organization Al-Haq and author of Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine, is son of Aziz, the first prominent Palestinian to accept Israels existence and advance a solution based on two states. She notes that the in-house fightings and the lack of the consensus are among major reasons for the plights of the Palestinians. The absence of the colonizing character of the state of Israel from her analysis in this regard is not only unfortunate but also dangerous as it lends the issue a religious/communal colour. Arguing against the dominant undercurrents of desert tribalism within Islam, Manji holds it responsible for a great deal of problems the Muslims are grappling with. This discourages the efforts to interpret the basic texts of Islam in a way that fulfills demands of the local milieus. The rigidity which Islam is supposed to be characterized with, originates from the elements of the desert tribalism and the clergy class plays a custodian to them. Here comes in the role of the Saudi Arabia which has been enabling the ulama to obliterate the local Islamic traditions in a better fashion, through pumping petro-dollars. Springs from the issue of desert tribalism, the debate of the Arab/Ajam (non-Arab) divide in the body of knowledge produced by the Muslims. It is argued that the contributions made by the Ajami Muslims not only outnumber those of the Arabs but the former lot has been more tolerant to the varieties of the interpretations of the basic texts of Islam. It is against this backdrop of the local vs global debate within Islam that Manji asks: why would Islam be so hard to extricate from local customs-tribal customs- if there wasnt something profoundly tribal about the religion to begin with? In short, this volume encapsulates serious questions about Islam and the contemporary experiences of the Muslims as well as sweeping statements and observations of the author as their answers.
(Arshad Amanullah is a Delhi-based documentary film-maker and researcher. He may be reached at arshad.mcrc@gmail.com) *****