I do not know this project, but I know Ms. Manji, and I am not a fan. I am not at all tied to pre-Islamic, post-Islamic, or just plain Islamic
anything, but I think the reform others see her as a spokesperson for deserves someone better than her, with better ideas and ways of communicating those ideas. It is not that I am against culturally-indoctrinated violence; certainly I am. But remember in another thread when someone posted a video of a debate between Manji and another, more conservative Muslim woman (at the Jewish American Institute or something like that)? I can’t remember the thread it is in, but Ms. Manji talked about the fact that Muslim women cannot marry outside of the faith. She said that she didn’t think it was right that this is so, and she went to a liberal, progressive-minded Imam and he drafted a document using Islamic sources including the Qur’an that gave Ms. Manji a supposedly credible basis for arguing against this traditional position from an Islamic perspective.
OK, fine. I honestly don’t care about this issue. I know several Muslim women, none terribly well, and while they all seem very nice, I don’t want to marry any of them.
But still, even I can see the problem with this approach: There is something in your religion that you dislike. You dislike this one thing (or maybe a few things), but you love everything else, and you love the culture that is found in your religion. You don’t want to leave it, but you still disagree with this one part of it. So you find someone out there, some priest or pastor of some persuasion, who you can go to who will tell you what you want to hear. Or if you can’t find such a person, maybe you realize that you care enough about this one issue of disagreement that you will leave your religion over it. It is has happened with Catholics that I know over certain issues like artificial birth control (and most of them still identify with the culture, since they are still technically “Catholic” by baptism and/or heritage). We would call such people “cafeteria Catholics”, because we know that our faith can’t work that way.
Similarly, I would say to Ms. Manji something similar: You can get any Imam you want to write you anything you’d like. Maybe people will follow that interpretation of the Qur’an. But if it is a matter of “Imam shopping” (and I have to believe that this happens, given the lack of central authority in Islam to bar people from just making things up), then what’s the point? This was just one example, but that sort of attitude is not acceptable from a Catholic, so it seems that I shouldn’t accept it from a Muslim, either, even if the conclusions that the hip, reform-minded Manji and other media personalities come up with are ones that I like better than the alternative.
It may be in poor taste, but I feel like it should also be noted that she is a homosexual. Given that the sinfulness of homosexuality is something on which Islam and Catholicism definitely agree, I wonder how Catholics who see her as a good example of an Islamic reformer would feel if she were instead a Catholic. Would/do we see Catholics, or even non-Catholics, who push for the acceptance of homosexuality by the Church as welcome reformers or not? What about those who push for the ordination of women into the priesthood?
One thing that any progressive person must do if they see wrong actions coming from their co-religionists is to try to guide them back to the traditional views of the issues on which the errant now deviate. How will Irshad Manji do this when she has no respect for those views herself? And then of course there is the question of whether or not the traditional view is itself the problem, but I’ll leave that to someone else to argue, since it is outside the scope of this thread.
