The Trouble With Islam

I finally made the time to sit and read Irshad Manji's book, The Trouble With Islam. I was initially drawn to the book after having attended a lecture of Manji's. After reading it, I've found it to resonate with so much of what I teach, and what I'm trying to write for my own dissertation. I'm hoping that tomorrow, after I've had the night to let it sink it, I'll do a little dissertation freewriting about it...

In the mean time, as usual, some of my favorite passages:

Manji, Irshad. The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim’s Call For Reform in Her Faith. Canada: Random House Canada, 2003. U.S. ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004.

(9) Lord, I loved this society. I loved that it seemed perpetually unfinished, the final answers not yet known—if ever they would be. I loved that, in a world under constant renovation, the contributions of individuals mattered.

(20-21) Praise Allah for the Internet. With the Web making self-censorship irrelevant—someone else is bound to say what you won’t—it became the place where intellectual risk-takers finally exhaled. They reasserted what makes the West a fierce if imperfect incubator of ideas: its love of discovery, including discovery of its [end page 20] own biases.

(32) When imitation goes mainstream, most of us fail to explore our prejudices—or even acknowledge that we have any. We believe what we’re supposed to believe, and that’s that.

(36) We all have agendas, some more equal than others.

(40) Endemic to that exercise is God’s other motive for creating various peoples: so we’ll feel an incentive to know one another. It’s as if the Creator intended us to use difference as an icebreaker rather than as an excuse to retreat into opposite corners.

(55) Recognizing that a frenzy of innovative thought can trigger moral confusion, Maimonides wanted Jews to retain sound scriptural principles without dumbing themselves down. This snippet from The Guide for the Perplexed demonstrates his intellectual honesty: “[I]t is in the nature of man to like what he is familiar with and in which he has been brought up, and that he fears anything alien. The plurality of religions and their mutual intolerance result from the face that people remain faithful to the education they received.”

(59) These scholars benefited from patronage and weren’t about to chirp an ode to openness when their masters wanted harsher lyrics.

(155) When people are indoctrinated to believe that any aspect of the founding moment is sacred, then the faith is destined to become static, brittle, inhumane.

(181) Why, over the past one thousand years, has the entire Arab world translated only as many books as Spain translates every year? Is it because the more people know about foreign notions, the more likely they’ll be to examine their own?

(185) Generating wealth is crucial to sustaining any new democracy because only a business class that can be taxed by the state will, in turn, compel the state to develop institutions that respond to people.

(186) Meanwhile, one more group is poised to demonstrate the possibilities of reforming Islam: Muslims in the West. We have the luxury of exercising civil liberties, especially free expression, to change tribal tendencies. Are we leveraging that freedom? Are enough non-Muslims challenging us to do so?

(188) Civilization is built by the artist, by the literary exponent, by the ability to generate beauty and music and new methods of expression.

(199) Amin Maalouf, a novelist in France, nails the point: “Traditions deserve to be respected only insofar as they are respectable—that is, exactly insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of men and women.”

(200-201) I propose that, as a guiding value, we in the West agree on individuality. When we celebrate individuality, we let most people [end page 200] choose who they are, be they members of a religion, free spirits, or both.

(203) Our global responsibility now is not to determine who owns what identity, but to convey to future generations what we all owe each other.

Want more: go to Irshad Manji's website.