Irshad Manji's ideas arrive with a strange mix of affinities. As an outspoken lesbian feminist, she knows she would not enjoy freedom in the Islamic world as she does in the West. She lives in Canada, having fled the oppression of Idi Amin in her homeland of Uganda. She refuses to hide from hard truth that many Islamists and their sympathizers in the West ignore. It's these hard truths that give power to her voice and why she calls herself a "refusenik." She doesn't refuse to be a Muslim. She refuses "to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah."
In her book, to be published here in January, she addresses "My Fellow Muslims" in a call for an Islamic Reformation to determine the course of Islam in the 21st century. "Through our screaming self-pity and our conspicuous silences, Muslims are conspiring against ourselves," she writes. "We're in crisis and we're dragging the rest of the world with us."
On her web site (www.Muslim-refusenik.com) she urges independent thinking and honest analysis over injustices done in the name of Islam, beginning with how Muslim societies treat women, the persistent Jew-bashing, the scourge of slavery in Islamic countries. She recalls the tolerance and freedom of expression that flourished in Islamic countries between the 10th and 13th centuries, and vows to work for its renewal.
"Liberal" Muslims say that what she criticizes isn't true Islam. She disagrees. "Prophet Muhammad himself said that religion is the way we conduct ourselves toward others," she says. "By that standard, how Muslims actually behave is Islam, and to sweep that reality under the rug of theory is to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our fellow human beings."
Would that Hanadi Jaradat, her handlers and the Islamist terrorists who kill, maim and destroy in the name of Allah had heard, and understood the message of Irshad Manji. If they had, and if they had acted on belief the slain of Haifa - some of them Jews and some of them Arabs - who celebrated the sunlight on the blue Mediterranean as it edged upon the white sand beach, would be thriving today. Their names would be written again in the Book of Life.
Instead we weep - for them all.