Irshad Manji Lecture
London, Thursday, 12 May 2005
Good evening, salaam, shalom… and for the Christians in the audience, how do you do?
It is, needless to say, a privilege to be here tonight. Richard has already mentioned that my planned appearance at Leicester University was cancelled. But the Lesbian and Gay Christina Movement, along with its allies, under the banner of ‘Faith, Politics, Human Rights’ has managed to honour its commitment to me. Never let them say that gays are sissies!
I am pleased to be here for all kinds of reasons. But you must appreciate, ladies and gentlemen, how much work has gone into bringing this event together tonight. You can see the plethora of different types of groups and organisations. I was thinking to myself as you were delivering your introduction, Richard, that I’ve proven myself an infidel to my fellow Muslims on many occasions, but tonight might take the cake; because not only am I working with the queers, but it’s also the Christians!
‘Oy’, is what I’d have to say.
And I say this with great affection, obviously. I say this with great affection to my fellow Muslims. I tease, I poke fun, I poke fun at myself, and tonight I hope we can let our defences down a little bit and have some honest discourse about whereto from here.
Let me actually start with a couple of notes on vulnerability. Speaking in this hall, the Mahatma Gandhi Hall, is especially appropriate, I think. Not simply because of the link to human rights, but also because Mahatma Gandhi who taught us many things, taught us, among others, that religion need not be unremittingly opposed to human rights. After all, Gandhi fashioned his earth-shattering concept of ‘satyagraha’, of civil disobedience from elements of Jainism and Hinduism.
Desmond Tutu, the Dali Lama, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, all can be forgiven for having religion because of what they did with religion. They sprung themselves and their people from the enfeebling patterns of victimhood.
Having said that, and let me also acknowledge – and this is the other point of vulnerability - that whenever anybody challenges religious conviction, does it actually matter whose doing the challenging and who holds those convictions? Whenever you challenge deeply held religious beliefs, you have to accept it’s going to be an emotional risk. After all, you’re not just asking people – believers, that is – to see this issue or rethink that point. No, you’re doing something much more visceral and primal. You’re challenging self-esteem, pride, ego, and ultimately: identity.
So I thoroughly understand why so many of my fellow Muslims become defensive about the kinds of ideas I’m going to explore with you tonight.
But to anybody, Muslim or non-Muslim, who has come to this hall tonight with defensiveness in their heart, please note that my own identity as a faithful Muslim has been vigorously challenged, even impugned, since the release of this book. And yet, I stand before you tonight thoroughly secure in that identity: as a faithful Muslim. Faithful enough to take seriously that passage in the Koran which states: “Believers, conduct yourselves with justice, and bear true witness before God, even if it be against yourselves, your parents or your family.”
I would like to believe that includes my religious family – no matter how much of a black sheep I may be.
And it is in that spirit of faithfulness that I come tonight.
Let me begin by talking a little bit about the ideas in my book. And then I’ll talk a little about why I’m so insanely passionate – and some might argue just plain insane – about promoting those ideas in such a public way. I’ll then move on to what the challenge is, I believe, not just for Muslims, but also for non-Muslims. And then we’ll throw it open to what I trust, or pray, will be a feisty Q&A.
So, to begin, a sip of water.
‘The Trouble With Islam’ is an open letter from me, a Muslim voice of reform, to concerned citizens worldwide, Muslim and non. And it is about why my faith community needs to come to terms with diversity: of ideas, of people, of belief systems in our Universe. And, how non-Muslims, in my judgement, do have a crucial role to play in helping us get there.
The kinds of themes that I’m exploring in this book, with what I intend is the utmost honesty, includes the ill-treatment of too many women in the Muslim world today - historically, I should say, it wasn’t like this, not during the Prophet Mohammed’s time; the Jew-bashing and Jew-baiting, in which too many Muslims persistently indulge – even here in the West; and the continued suppression of minorities that are not simply religious, but others also, such as sexual minorities in large swaths of the Islamic world.
Well, you can see, given this broad range of issues: women; Jews; gays, they all fall under the banner of universal human rights. And, ladies and gentlemen, it is because I believe that human right are universal, that I do no believe any community, any ethnicity, any culture, any religion, out to be immune from scrutiny on that front: namely, respecting the universality of human rights.
Now I recognise, both in my book and before you tonight, that every religion has its share of literalists. Catholicism: its highest echelons have elected yet another arch-conservative pope. American Protestantism has its evangelicals, some of whose pope’s occupy the White House today. Jews have their ultra-orthodox. And understand, many orthodox Jews have tried to convince me that, “Irshad, at least we believe in continuous interpretation.”
“Sure,” I respond, “tell that to the Jewish women, including the secular Jewish women, in Israel who must seek divorces by going to Rabbinical Courts… and often land up at the hands of those Rabbis not with divorces, but with the shaft! You tell them that as ultra-conservative Jews, as ultra-orthodox Jews, you believe enough in continuous interpretation to practice it.”
Even Buddhists, for god’s sakes, have fundamentalists. Now, don’t ask me how that one works! That might be another book, for another author, and – if I may inject some cheap Buddhist humour – for another lifetime.
But, I would suggest to you that only in Islam today is literalism mainstream worldwide.
Let me explain to you what I mean by that rather irritating and sweeping statement.
We Muslims - even here in the West – are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran comes after the Torah and the Bible, historically and chronologically, it is the final, and therefore perfect, manifesto of God’s will, not given to the kinds of ambiguities and inconsistencies and outright contradictions – and God forbid, human editing – like all of those other sacred texts. No. Even moderate Muslims believe as an article of faith that the Koran is not like any other sacred text. It is, if I could put it this way, GOD 3.0, and none shall come after it.
Now this is a supremacy complex.
And, it’s a supremacy complex that I argue in my book is dangerous. Why dangerous?
Not because I believe that moderates will suddenly become Jihadists and begin hurling bombs at the so-called Infidels – better duck, I might be one of them, right? – I’m not suggesting that at all, I’m suggesting that this supremacy complex is dangerous because when abuse happens under the banner of Islam – as is the case in too many parts of the world today – most Muslims today, even those of us with fancy titles and formal education, PhDs in engineering and medicine: most Muslims today do not yet know how to debate or dissent with the Jihadists. And it’s not because we’re stupid and it’s not because we don’t wish to. First and foremost, it’s because we have not yet been introduced to the possibility of asking questions about our supposedly perfect Holy Book.
The same, I will humbly submit to all of you, cannot be said today for moderate Christians and Jews.
And this, I think, is the key to understanding why there has been such a thundering silence among moderate Muslims in the face of Islam’s folly. You see, the Jihadists are so adroit at quoting from the Koran to support their Jihads, and because the rest of us have been led to believe that questioning the Koran is off-limits, we’re left with the feeling that questioning – openly questioning – the Koran of the Jihadists, is tantamount to questioning the Koran itself. And that’s supposed to be a no-no.
Well, I’m here to say: questioning is not off-limits! And not because Irshad Manji with spiky hair, and a western background, and feminism… not because that Irshad Manji says so, but because Islamic tradition says so.
The biggest point I make in my book – and it is not an original one, it just happens to be more vocally expressed than most have. The biggest point I make in my book is that Islam once exuded a tradition of independent thinking known as ‘Ijtihad’.
Now I realise, ladies and gentlemen, that this word, ‘Ijtihad’ sounds eerily like ‘Jihad’ to many non-Arab ears. In fact, it comes from the same [Arabic] root: to struggle.
But unlike any notion of violent struggle – and by the way, ‘Jihad’ does not mean violent struggle – unlike any concept of violence in struggle, Ijtihad is all about independent thinking and critical reasoning.
You know in the early centuries of Islam, thanks to the spirit of Ijtihad, a hundred and thirty-five schools of legal thought flourished in Islam. In Muslim Spain, scholars would teach their students to abandon quote “expert opinion” about the Koran if their own conversations with the ambiguous Koran came up with better evidence or other peaceful ideas. And in Cordoba, one of the most sophisticated cities in Muslim Spain, there were seventy libraries. Seventy! Now that rivals the number of libraries in most cosmopolitan cities today. I should add, it also rivals the number of McDonalds in most cosmopolitan cities today!
So much of what you and I may take for granted as western pop-culture was in fact shaped by Muslims. Let me just give you a quick partial list, because I think you might find this interesting:
Among the first universities in recorded history sprang up in Baghdad in the 9th century. It was known as ‘The House of Wisdom”; Muslims gave the world mocha coffee; the beginnings of cough syrup; the guitar; and even that ultra-Spanish expression “Ole!” – which has its root in the Arabic word “Allah”.
I think the beauty of emphasising Ijtihad is that I’m not asking my fellow Muslims to import a foreign tradition, or an alien virtue into their faith – not at all. People like me – the Ijtihadists – are reminding our fellow-Muslims and educating non-Muslims that Islam once embraced a pluralistic, progressive tradition of thought, that there is no reason (save for pure politics) we cannot have again.
In fact, we need to rediscover the tradition of Ijtihad in order to update the practice of Islam for the 21st Century.
And how might that manifest itself, you might wonder?
Let’s take the three human rights fields that I mentioned at the top of my talk: women, religious pluralism and homosexuality.
Let’s start with women.
You know, popular wisdom, particularly in this part of the world, has it that the Koran is opposed to women’s rights. Not so. It’s true – and I’m intellectually honest enough to acknowledge that the Koran, like the Bible and the Torah, contains verses that are both hostile and threatening towards women. In the ‘hostile’ category, you have a verse that tells men: ‘women are your fields - go then into your fields and do as you please’.
Do as you please? Isn’t that a recipe for unlimited power?
Elsewhere the Koran states that men, by spending money to maintain women, can claim authority over women.
Now, far from being abstruse, that passage has influenced the human rights charter – I should say “so-called human rights charter” – adopted by Muslim countries in 1990. It’s known as “The Cairo Declaration” and it explicitly states that husbands must be the bread-winners for their families. Now think about this: if husbands must be the providers, and the Koran states that men, by spending money to maintain women can lord it over women, it doesn’t take a theologian to recognise that these are the underpinnings of a serious power imbalance.
At the same time, the Koran contains many passages that embrace the dignity of women. For example, the Koran gives women the right to reject marriage. In fact, Islamic lore tells the story of a Sufi Muslim, a mystic by the name of Rabiah, who was given her choice of suitors and interviewed the smartest among them and decided he wasn’t strong enough for her. So, she decided not to marry him at all and stayed single.
The Koran also gives women who chose to accept marriage the invitation – actually I’d say the encouragement – to draw up a marital contract so that their rights as women are as much protected in the relationship as the man’s rights are. You could say that Islam gave the world the ‘pre-nup’ before it was even popular. Too bad more Imams and Mullahs don’t teach this to their congregations.
The bottom line being that misogynistic interpretations of the Koran are not inevitable. Alternate interpretations are possible. And rather than merely chant “Islam means peace, Islam is love”, be that fact, we moderate Muslims must take the responsibility for publicly and openly articulating interpretations of the Koran that compete with literalist approaches.
On the question of religious pluralism, it is absolutely true that the Koran advises Muslims not to take Christians and Jews as friends, lest we become one of them. It describes them as an unjust people whom God does not guide. There’s talk of spiking and slaughtering and slavery and even subjecting non-Muslims to a special tax known as “Jiziya” as a tribute to their Muslim conquerors, as a way of protecting themselves from the violence of ?????
Some of Islam is truly ?????
On the other hand, the Koran also heaps praise on the prophet Abraham, the garandfather of the three monotheisms. The Koran actually does something which I would call highly un-Islamic. It describes Jesus as the Messiah. And more than once. Christ’s mother, Mary, gets several positive mentions – and this is something to note – the Koran describes Jews as the “Exhalted nation”. In fact, in a number of separate passages – not linked, but separate – the Koran also validates the sovereign role of Jews in the Holy Land.
You know what all of this contradiction means, don’t you? That Muslims that wish to live ‘by the book’ (as we say, at least in North American lingo) , Muslims that live ‘by the book’ have no choice but to make choices: about what to emphasise and what to downplay. Selectiveness is inevitable.
Which brings me to the question of homosexuality in Islam.
I realise that even by calling it a question, I’m transcending some kind of a line, because for most Muslims it’s not a question at all, it’s obvious: the Koran opposes homosexuality. Do I not know the story of Lut? Yeah! I know the story.
Let me start the case for why homosexuality and Islam might be compatible by saying this much first: in making the case for the possibility of reconciliation, I am not interested in seeking the approval of my fellow Muslims for my sexual orientation. It matters not a widget to me whether I get approval, from Muslims or anybody else for the fact that I’m a lesbian. The approval I seek openly and only is that of my creator. And if he is as merciful and compassionate as almost every verse in the Koran tells me he is, then we’ll have a very lovely conversation on the day that I meet him.
So, without wanting to court or seek approval, here’s the case that I make for the possible compatibility between Islam and homosexuality.
The Koran, if it is to be believed in whole or in part, we should recognise that it contains certain passages that are pro-diversity. For example, the Koran states that everything God made is, quote, “excellent”; that nothing that God has made is, quote, ”in vane”; and that God creates, quote, “who he will”. Fascinating. Because that suggests that God is all-powerful, all knowing, incapable of making mistakes.
So, if God did not wish to create me a lesbian, then why did he not use his unparalleled powers to create somebody else in my place?
“Aha!” my sophisticated critics reply, “but he did create someone else in your place, Ms Manji. He created straight people.”
Yes, I reply, that’s true, but he also created female people and white people. Does that mean God never intended to create male people or brown people or black people? And, oh, by the way, the fact that God did create me, a lesbian, does that imply by your logic, that he did not intend to create straight people?
You can see how tedious such an argument becomes.
To that, the detractors say, “okay, but like the Jihadists who cherry-pick verses from the Koran to support their agendas, you are clearly cherry-picking picking the two or three lines in the Koran that can be interpreted to support your agenda.
Well, maybe. Remember, any interpretation is going to be selective – including literalist interpretations. But – these aren’t just two or three lines in the Koran. In fact, Islam’s holy book contains oodles of passages that suggest that God defends diversity.
One in particular springs to mind: “If God had pleased, he would have made you all one people, but he has done otherwise, so that he may try you in what he has given you. Pass forward in your good works.”
Now, a passage like this tells me that not only is there virtue in cultivating difference, but that the breathtaking multiplicity of our world is divinely designed.
Well them the critics come back to say: “Even if all of this is true – and that’s a big ‘if’ – society, in order to function properly, needs order. We need to draw the line somewhere.”
And I happen to agree: values arte very important. Pluralism happens to be chief among my values, but values are important. The question I have of the line-drawers is the following: how do you know that the anti-gay verses trump the pro-diversity verses? Why don’t the pro-diversity verses get that honour? Why?
You’ll notice I’m not claiming I’m right. I don’t know that I am. But I am challenging my detractors with this question: what makes them so sure they are right?
It seems to me that if we all cared more about where a majestic, complex creator might stand than where we as human beings stand, then we, as Muslims, need only accept one thing – and that’s not homosexuality. We only accept that as thorny an issue as homosexuality is, there is plenty of room in the Koran for discussion, debate and dissent.
All this might sound terribly radical. It’s not. It’s asking questions. And questions are at the heart of Islam’s lost tradition of Ijtihad.
I don’t think I’m radical at all. In seeking to restore Ijtihad people like me are actually traditionalists.
Now the question – since the release of the book – has often been asked: “are you insane? Irshad, why would you put your name, your face, that hair, to a book that tackles the cornerstone tablets of contemporary Islam? Are you nuts?”
“No mom,” I reply “please hear me out.”
And she has. And any of you, please feel free to ask how my mother has evolved in her attitude throughout this journey.
But let me tell you why I needed, at a deeply cellular level, to write this book. There are many reasons.