"We in the twenty-first century live with the consequences of this thousand-year-old strategy to keep the empire from imploding. But I've got news for you: The Islamic Empire no longer exists. I'll say it again. The empire's gone. We're here. And the gates of itjtihad--our minds--remain, for the most part, closed. Why should this be?"
---from The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith--Irshad Manji (2003, St. Martin's Press).
Irshad Manji is a brave woman. She is brave in the way that Mahatma Gandhi was brave, brave enough to fight a powerful British empire and the prejudices and bad habits of his very own Hindu culture to get at the Truth. She is brave enough to go to Israel and see for herself how that democracy really treats Muslims. (It is more complex than the anti-Zionist propagandists would have people believe.) She is brave enough to claim her right to go to the Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem and look bearded and threatening men who hate her right in the face and tell them she is a Muslim,too, and won't be stopped from worshiping the God of Abraham, even if this cosmopolitan Western lesbian woman is the last type of worshipper the Sharia law ultra-conservatives want anywhere near the third-holiest shrine in their world.
She has risked her life by saying things on her Canadian TV shows and documentaries and PBS Specials that stir up loads of threatening hate mail against her. Because of this she to live in a house with bulletproof windows and has to have every car she travels in checked from bombs before turning over the ignition.
And all that doesn't shut her up.
Oh, Oprah Winfrey honored her as being brave. Good enough for me.
She is a 39 year-old Canadian writer and television journalist who has a thing or two to say to the Islamic extremists who are obsessed with controlling her faith. Her book on Islam and its troubles offers a strident, sometimes informal and personal, but strong, intelligent and powerfully indignant look at the times we live in vis a vi the forces of Islamic fundamentalism (Al-Queda and the Osama Bin Laden crowd, Wahhabi/Saudi Arabian "desert" Islam, the Madrassa schools where the Koran is held to be above analysis, et al) and the pluralistic West, where our polyglot of peoples, while imperfect, can at least offers chances for Muslims to open their minds to other perspectives without fear of being jailed or killed. (Although one is never safe in our "global village" from the power of extremists and their reach into any person's life, as the events of 9/11 and the terrible bombings in Madrid and London in recent years have made all too clear.)
I admit to not having a profound understanding of Islam, but I think i've gathered enough about comparative religion to know that openness is not the strong suit of religious fundementalists--especially if they are feeling desperate. And some Muslims, Manji writes, have a feeling of desperation born of the military and social backwardness the Arab world has grappled with in the last hundred years or more. This turn of affairs has drawn many Arab Muslims back to foundementalism. The word she has coined is defined by the author as a chauvanistic attitude that aspires to push the world back in time, either to Islam's Golden Age (800-1250 AD) when the Arab world was the center of the faith and more advanced than the Medeval West or to the very beginnings of Islam in Medina and Mecca in the 7th Century. The idea is, "we founded this religion. The Phophet is an Arab. The Koran , written first in Arabic, is the true Islam, etc, etc, etc." So all the other outposts of the faith (Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, etc) have to sooner or later conform to what Manji calls 'desert Islam'". This version of the last major Abrahamic faith is packed with tribal suspicions, patriarchical excesses and still features the type of spiritual warfare often fought with real weapons, as is the case in Iraq between Shia and Sunni groups.
What is needed the author believes is an Islamic Reformation, which she calls "Operation Ijtihad", essentially the process by which Muslims are supposed to question their Holy Book and be self-critical about their thinking toward their faith. Also how they treat and regard those non-Muslims around them and about civilizations like the West, India and China that are not Islam-based. It is this lack of self-critical soul-searching that she feels plauges mainstream Islam, that which is dominated by religious authorities in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
"Learning about ijtihad spurred me to ask: Who are these religious authorities? I mean, does the Koran recognize a formal clergy? Nope. Do the Koran's wild mood swings make any interpetation of its text selective and subjective? Yep. So, could it be that the right of independent thinking, the right of ijtihad, is in fact open to all of us? That by arrogating this right to themselves, the follow-my-fatwa ayatollahs are the actual heretics?" (the author, page 51)
Ijtihad is an old tradition that has fallen by the wayside, taken away from the very ordinary people reform-minded men like Muhammad himself were trying to reach. Manji wants it taken up again, as it was in the Islamic past, a glorious past that made cities like Cordoba in Muslim Spain and the libraries of Baghdad the envy of learned folks in Christian Europe 800-900 years ago.
The sad thing is that there aren't more voices among prominent Muslims in the West speaking out this way. Fresh viewpoints to the situations like those between Israelis and Palestinians right now are much needed.
For more on this lady, here are some links to let her speak for herself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OTECls6A4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ocH3JHjZfQ
for a non-Youtube link, click on the author's name in the first paragraph above, where you can link to Ms. Manji's website, "MuslimRefusnik".
No comments:
Post a Comment