By Bill Marsano. Is there a campaign against Irshad Manji's book? Certainly it seems something odd is afoot. Impartial readers should examine the reviews posted (52 as of April 10) and decide for themselves. I have; here are my conclusions:
Thirty reviews are positive--3 to five stars--and 14 (nearly 50%) are by people who have reviewed for Amazon before. Only 7 (less than 25%) are anonymous, signed "A Reader"). In general, the reviewers discuss the merits of the <book>.
Twenty-two reviews are hostile--almost all only 1 star--and only 5 (about 23%) are by previous Amazon reviewers. (One claims a children's game caused repeated vomiting by her child; reviews a $2.79 screwdriver; and attacks a book she admits not having read. In short, she doesn't review--she rants.) Nine (about 40%) are anonymous. Many are merely ad hominem attacks on the author, who is described as dishonest, ignorant, money-hungry, publicity-seeking (even fatwa-seeking) and fostering a "craze for Islamophobia." One calls Manji "simply not a Muslim" because of her "inability to read Arabic, absence from active Mulim worship, embrace of the West and its secular values, not to mention her identity as a Lesbian feminist."
I believe Amazon's reader-reviews are important and should not be distorted by partisan attacks. Readers should be alert to possible unfairness in this case. Now (at last) to the book itself.
Manji addresses her fellow Muslims thus: "I have to be honest with you. Islam is on pretty thin ice with me. I'm hanging on by my fingernails . . . ." What sounds like a nifty, snappy, wise-ass opener is, it soon becomes clear, really an expression of pain. Spirituality is important to Manji, and she feels her religion has betrayed her--from childhood onward--and she makes a number of important points.
First, she rejects the notion, popular since 9/11, that the problem isn't Islam but that Islam has been 'highjacked' by murderous psychopaths. No, she says: Mainstream Islam IS the culprit; it is cruel and even brutal toward women, toward Jews, toward Christians, toward all other infidels--even toward other Muslims. Dissident Muslims can be and have been beaten, imprisoned, killed. Muslims who aren't religious enough (e.g., those impious, kite-flying Afghanis) have been crushed. (Indeed, they were the Taliban's first victims: There's nothing fundamentalists hate more than apostates.)
As for the simplistic idea that "you mustn't confuse Islam with culture," she's all too well aware that Islam and such cultural horrors as Sharia law go hand in hand, each supporting the other. Sharia law, you may recall, means honor killings, punishing homosexuals by toppling walls on them, punishing adulteresses by stoning them to death, and defining rape victims as adulteresses.
She is clear on Islam's hermetic nature: Ask a question and get no answer, especially if you're a woman. Propose interpretation and be told the Koran is the literal word of God--and that the 'hadiths' or secondary sources are likewise not to be questioned, analyzed, interpreted. The source of this closed view is, she says, "desert Islam"--the narrow, harsh Wahabist Islam of Saudi Arabia. Its hermeticism is only increasing. The Koran, according to fundamentalists, can't be translated but must be read in Arabic (some also believe that only Arabs are "real Muslims"), and the Wahabist madressas (religious schools) don't want many people to read it even in Arabic. They don't teach reading but foster illiteracy; their students must learn to recite Koranic verses by rote.
Very interesting: What you can't read, you can't question or analyze or parse. You can't even know there are contradictory Koranic passages of compassion and tolerance toward non-believers and other beliefs. Can they be literally God's words? "The Koran is so profoundly at war with itself," says Manji, "that Muslims who 'live by the book' have no choice but to choose what to emphasize and what to downplay." Unless, of course, they're madressa-trained illiterates who will never know the contradictions exist. Imagine that: a religion with a vested interest in illiteracy. Is that a recipe for backwardness, or what?
Manji says most "moderate Mulims" allow these and other abuses to continue without protest. They remain silent--silent except, Manji says, for "screaming self-pity." Indeed, Muslims are frequently quoted in the New York Times on being maginalized, discriminated against and harmed by "backlash" and Islamophobia. Really? Such reports conspicuously lack anything but accusations and charges; there are never any facts. If Muslims in America in particular and the West in general were being victimized, do you not think you'd have heard about it by now? Manji's view and mine is that Western Muslims either support the abuses of desert Islam--or they are crippled by fear of retirbution.
In 217 pages Manji cannot be a scholar nor a historian. She goes a little too easily on the West and Isrtael at times. But she is successful at raising important questions, contradictions and challenges. She is not the best of writers--her tone is urgent, insistent and unmoldulated (to the point of being tedious at times). But her flaws are few and her courage cannot be questioned.--Bill Marsano is a professional writer and editor.
