The trouble with Islam : a Muslim's call for reform in her faith

Irshad Manji. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [219]-225). THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAMA Muslim's Call for Reform in Her FaithBy Irshad ManjiSt. Martin's Press Copyright © 2003 Irshad ManjiAll right reserved.ISBN: 0-312-32699-8Chapter One HOW I BECAME A MUSLIM REFUSENIKLike millions of Muslims over the last forty years, my familyimmigrated to the West. We arrived in Richmond, a middle-classsuburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1972. I was fouryears old. Between 1971 and 1973, thousands of South AsianMuslims fled Uganda after the military dictator, General IdiAmin Dada, proclaimed Africa to be for the blacks. He gavethose of us with brown skin mere weeks to leave or we woulddie. Muslims had spent lifetimes in East Africa thanks to theBritish, who brought us from South Asia to help lay the railwaysin their African colonies. Within a few generations, many Muslimsrose to the rank of well-off merchants. My father and his brothersran a Mercedes-Benz dealership near Kampala, benefitingfrom the class mobility that the British bequeathed to us butthat we, in turn, never granted to the native blacks whom weemployed. In the main, the Muslims of East Africa treated blacks likeslaves. I remember my father beating Tomasi, our domestic, hardenough to raise shiny bruises on his pitch-dark limbs. Althoughmy two sisters, my mother, and I loved Tomasi, we too would bepummeled if my dad caught us tending to his injuries. I knew thisto be happening in many more Muslim households than mine,and the bondage continued well after my family left. That'swhy, as a teenager, I turned down the opportunity to visit relativesin East Africa. "If I go with you," I warned my mother,"you know I'll have to ask your fat aunties and uncles why theypractically enslave their servants." Mum meant the trip to be agood-bye to aging relations, not a human rights campaign. Inorder to avoid embarrassing her, I stayed home. While Mum was away, I thought more about what it meansbe "home." I decided that home is where my dignity lives, notnecessarily where my ancestors put down roots. That's when itdawned on me why the postcolonial fever of pan-Africanism-"Africafor the blacks!"-swept the continent on which I wasborn. We Muslims made dignity difficult for people darker thanus. We callously exploited native Africans. And please don't tellme that we learned colonial ruthlessness from the Britishbecause that begs the question: Why didn't we also learn tomake room for entrepreneurial blacks as the Brits had maderoom for us? I don't apologize for being offended by the notion of havinga Tomasi. Most of you, I'm sure, oppose servitude, too. But itwasn't Islam that fostered my belief in the dignity of every individual.It was the democratic environment to which my familyand I migrated: Richmond, where even a little Muslim girl canbe engaged-and I don't mean for marriage. Let me explain. A couple of years after the family settled down, my dad discoveredfree baby-sitting services at Rose of Sharon BaptistChurch. (Say "free" to an immigrant and religious affiliationstake a backseat to the bargain at hand.) Every week, whenMum left the house to sell Avon products door to door, myless-than-child-friendly father dumped the kids at church.There, the South Asian lady who supervised Bible study showedme and my older sister the same patience she displayed with herown son. She made me believe my questions were worth asking.Obviously, the questions I posed as a seven-year-old could onlybe simple ones. Where did Jesus come from? When did he live?What was his job? Who did he marry? These queries didn't putanyone on the spot, but my point is that the act of asking-andasking some more-always met with an inviting smile. Maybe that's what motivated me, at age eight, to win theMost Promising Christian of the Year Award. My prize: abrightly illustrated edition of 101 Bible Stories. I look back nowand thank God I wound up in a world where the Koran didn'thave to be my first and only book, as if it's the lone richness thatlife offers to believers. Besides, 101 Bible Stories riveted me withits pictures. What would 101 Koran Stories look like? At thetime, I hadn't seen such a thing. Today, there's no dearth of children'sbooks about Islam, including A Is for Allah, by Yusuf Islam(formerly Cat Stevens). Free societies allow for the reinventionof self and the evolution of faiths. Shortly after I earned the title of Most Promising Christian,Dad plucked me out of the church. A madressa, or Islamic religiousschool, would soon be constructed. This little geek couldn'twait. If my Sunday school experience was any barometer, themadressa would be fun, or so I innocently assumed. Meanwhile, my new world was growing up with me. Asprawling mall that would be pivotal in my education as aMuslim, Lansdowne Centre, opened. The names of Richmond'sfounding Scots, emblazoned on outdoor signs-Brighouse,McNair, Burnett, Steveston-soon jostled for attention withwords in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, andJapanese. These languages blanketed the interior of AberdeenCentre, built several years later and billed as "the largest enclosedAsian-themed shopping plaza in North America." Well before then, it struck me that a place like Richmondcould accommodate just about anybody who expressed initiative.In the tenth grade, I ran for student body president atJ. N. Burnett Junior High School. The year before, I'd lost mybid to become homeroom representative, the deciding votebeing cast by a grungy twerp who didn't want a "Paki" incharge of his classroom. Only a year later, a majority of studentsin the whole school made this Paki their duly electedleader. In Richmond, racism didn't have to fence my ambitionsany more than race itself had to define me. A few months after I became student body president, thevice-principal of my school was strolling past my locker andstopped dead when he glimpsed the poster of Iranian revolutionariesI had taped inside. Sent to me by an uncle in France,the poster depicted women in black chadors smashing the wingsof an airplane. The left wing had the Soviet hammer and sicklepainted on it and the right wing sported the U.S. stars andstripes. "This isn't appropriate," he cautioned me. "Take it down." I pointed to the next locker over, whose door had an Americanflag hanging from it. "If she can express her opinionopenly," I asked, "why can't I?" "Because you're trivializing our democratic values. And aspresident of all students, you should know better." I confess to not realizing that Ayatollah Khomeini's regimeoozed totalitarianism. I hadn't done my homework. Seducedpartly by propaganda and partly by the pride of living in a freesociety, I wanted to advocate diversity of opinion so that theStar-Spangled Banner wouldn't strangle other perspectives. SoI argued. "I'm trivializing democracy? How is it that you'resupporting democracy by telling me that I can't express myself,but," pointing to the flag-draped locker, "somebody else can?" We stared at each other. "You're setting a bad example," thevice-principal said. He stiffened his back and walked away. You've got to credit him for letting diversity of opinion surviveat Burnett Junior High. It's all the more admirable given hisown embrace of evangelical Christianity. He didn't veil his personalbeliefs, but neither did he foist them on the students-notwhen the student council president appeared to be a booster ofKhomeini's theocracy, and not even when the students lobbiedfor school shorts that revealed more leg than he thought appropriate.After a heated debate with us and a few strategic delays,he okayed the shorts, bristling but still respecting popular will.How many Muslim evangelicals do you know who tolerate theexpression of viewpoints that distress their souls? Of course, myvice-principal had to bite his tongue in the public school system,but such a system can only emerge from a consensus thatpeople of different faiths, backgrounds, aspirations, and stationsought to tussle together. How many Muslim countries toleratesuch a tussle? Lord, I loved this society. I loved that it seemed perpetuallyunfinished, the final answers not yet known-if ever they wouldbe. I loved that, in a world under constant renovation, the contributionsof individuals mattered. But at home, my father's ready fist ensured his family's obedienceto an arbitrary domestic drill. Don't laugh at dinner. When Isteal your savings, shut up. When I kick your ass, remember, it'll beharder next time. When I pound your mother, don't call the police. Ifthey show up, I'll charm them into leaving, and you know they will.The moment they're gone, I'll slice off your ear. If you threaten to alertsocial services, I'll amputate your other ear. The one time my father chased me through the house with aknife, I managed to fly out of my bedroom window and spendthe night on the roof. My mum had no idea of my situationbecause she was working the graveyard shift at an airline company.Just as well; I'm not sure I would have crawled down forany promise of safety she might have offered. For the same reasonthat I liked my school and Rose of Sharon Baptist Churchand, years later, Aberdeen Centre, I liked the roof. From each ofthese perches, I could survey a world of open-ended possibility.In the East African Muslim community from which I came,would I have been allowed to dream of a formal education? Oflanding scholarships? Of participating in political races, nevermind holding office? To judge by the grainy black-and-whitephotos that showed me, at age three, playing a bride with herhead covered, hands folded, eyes downcast, and legs danglingfrom the sofa, I can only guess that unremitting subserviencewould have been my lot if we'd stayed in the confines of MuslimUganda. How's that for a firm grasp of the obvious? The bigger question is this: Why did the Richmond madressa,set up by immigrants to this land of rights and freedoms, chooseautocracy? From age nine to age fourteen, I spent every Saturdaythere. Classes took place on the upper floor of the newly builtmosque, which resembled a mammoth suburban house more thanit did Middle Eastern architecture. Inside, however, you got sternIslam through and through. Men and women entered the mosqueby different doors and planted themselves on the correct sides ofan immovable wall that cut the building in half, quarantining thesexes during worship. Set in this wall was a door that connectedthe men's and women's sides. This came in handy after services,when men would demand more food from the communalkitchen by thrusting their bowls through the door, banging onthe wall, and waiting mere seconds for a woman's arm to thrustback the replenished bowls. In the mosque, men never had tosee women, and women never had to be seen. If that isn't thedefinition of assigning us small lives, then I'm missing somethingbig. One flight up was the madressa, with its depressing decor ofburnt-brown rugs, fluorescent lights, and portable partitions thatseparated the girls from the boys. Wherever classes congregatedwithin the wide expanse of that room, a partition would tagalong. Worse was the partition between mind and soul. In mySaturday classes I learned that if you're spiritual, you don't think.If you think, you're not spiritual. This facile equation rubbed upagainst the exhilarating curiosity in me that Richmond indulged.Call it my personal clash of civilizations. The solution wasn't simply to accept that there's a secularworld and a nonsecular one, and that each has its ways of being.By that logic, the decidedly nonsecular Rose of Sharon BaptistChurch should have quashed my questions. Instead, my curiositybrought me praise there. At Burnett Junior High, a secularschool, my questions bugged the bejeezus out of my vice-principalbut nobody shut me down. In both places, the dignityof the individual prevailed. Not so at my madressa. I entered itspremises wearing a white polyester chador and departed severalhours later with my hair flattened and my spirit deflated, as ifthe condom over my head had properly inoculated me from"unsafe" intellectual activity. Before airing more dirty laundry, let me be fair to mymadressa teacher-we'll call him Mr. Khaki. He was as sincere aMuslim as they come. This bony brother with a finely trimmedbeard (signifying cleanliness) and a Honda Mini Compact (indicatingmodesty) volunteered his services each weekend (provingcharity) to give the children of Muslim immigrants the religiouseducation that they might otherwise forfeit to the promiscuityof values in a multicultural country. No easy task, since themadressa attracted students from across the age spectrum: self-consciousprepubescents struggling with acne, giggly types whotook cover in the bathroom, adolescents sprouting moustaches-andthat's just the girls. I'm kidding ... sort of. Most of us saw the madressa not so much as a place of learning,but as a pond from which to fish out our future mates.Because mouthy chicks don't get husbands, my girlfriends rarelyargued with Mr. Khaki. So what was my problem? Didn't I wantto be somebody's wife someday? Don't get me started. My problemwas this: Enamored of that multilayered world beyond themadressa, I insisted on being educated rather than indoctrinated. The trouble began with Know Your Islam, the primer that Ipacked in my madressa bag every week. After reading it, I neededto know more about "my" Islam. Why must girls observe theessentials, such as praying five times a day, at an earlier age thanboys? Because, Mr. Khaki told me, girls mature sooner. Theyreach the "obligatory age" of practice at nine compared to thirteenfor boys. "Then why not reward girls for our maturity by letting uslead prayer?" I asked. "Girls can't lead prayer." "What do you mean?" "Girls aren't permitted." "Why not?" "Allah says so." "What's His reason?" "Read the Koran." I tried, though it felt artificial since I didn't know Arabic.Do I see you nodding your head? Most Muslims have no cluewhat we're saying when we're reciting the Koran in Arabic.It's not that we're obtuse. Rather, Arabic is one of the world'smost rhythmic languages, and weekly lessons at the madressasimply don't let us grasp its intricacies. Haram, for instance, canrefer to something forbidden or something sacred, dependingon which "a" you stress. Forbidden versus sacred: We're nottalking subtle shifts in meaning here. To the inherent challengesof this language, add the realities of life. In my case, aviolent father who practiced religion mostly for show and amother who did her best to be devout while striving to sustaina household on shift work. You can appreciate why Arabicstudy failed to rate as a family priority. Frankly, Mr. Continues...Excerpted from THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAMby Irshad Manji Copyright © 2003 by Irshad Manji. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.