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Irshad Manji (born 1968) is a Ugandan-born Canadian educator. She is the author of The Trouble with Islam Today (2004) and Allah, Liberty and Love (2011), both of which have been banned in several Muslim countries. She also produced a PBS documentary in the America at a Crossroads series, titled Faith Without Fear, which was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008. A former journalist and television presenter, Manji is an advocate of a reformist interpretation of Islam and a critic of literalist interpretations of the Qur'an.
Her latest book, Don't Label Me (2019), proposes methods on how to heal political, racial, and cultural divides. The ideas in the book are related to the Moral Courage Project, which Manji founded at New York University in 2008 and expanded to the University of Southern California (USC) in 2016, when she was a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy. After leaving USC, she founded Moral Courage College with the goal of teaching "young people how to engage honestly about polarizing issues rather than shaming or canceling each other". Manji lectures on these themes as a senior research fellow with the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights.
When Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of Asians and other non-Africans from Uganda in the early 1970s, Manji and her family came to Canada as refugees when she was four years old. They settled in Richmond, British Columbia, near Vancouver. Manji attended secular public schools and, every Saturday, a religious school (madrasa). Manji says that, at 14 years old, she was expelled from the madrasa for asking too many questions.
In 1990, Manji earned a bachelor's degree with honours in the history of ideas from the University of British Columbia, and won the Governor General's Academic Medal for top humanities graduate. In 2002, Manji became writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto's Hart House, from where she began writing The Trouble with Islam Today. She was a visiting fellow with the International Security Studies program at Yale University in 2006 and was a senior fellow with the Brussels-based European Foundation for Democracy from 2006 to 2012.
Manji hosted and produced several public affairs programs on television, including Q-Files for Pulse24 and its successor for the Toronto-based Citytv in the late 1990s. When she left the show, Manji donated the television set's "big Q" to the Pride Library at the University of Western Ontario.
She has also appeared on television networks around the world, including Al Jazeera, the CBC, BBC, MSNBC, C-SPAN, CNN, PBS, the Fox News Channel, CBS, and HBO.
She was also a visiting professor at New York University (NYU) from 2008 to 2015. Manji joined NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to create the Moral Courage Project, an initiative to teach young people how to speak truth to power within their own communities. Her courses focused on how "to make values-driven decisions for the sake of their integrity – professional and personal". In April 2013, Moral Courage TV (on YouTube), was launched by Manji and Cornel West, a professor and activist. West spoke of Manji's work as a "powerful force for good." In 2015, Manji developed "the West Coast presence of Moral Courage" at the Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy of the University of Southern California.
Tarek Fatah, a fellow Canadian Muslim who originally criticized The Trouble With Islam, reversed his stance, saying that Manji was "right about the systematic racism in the Muslim world" and that "there were many redeeming points in her memoir".
The Trouble with Islam Today is banned in many countries in the Middle East. Since July 2009, the book has also been outlawed in Malaysia.
Manji agrees to and promotes the validity of interfaith marriages of Muslims to non-Muslims, specially of Muslim women to non-Muslim men, based on ideas of Khaleel Mohammed of San Diego State University (SDSU), in San Diego, California.
As with Manji's other writings, Allah, Liberty and Love generated both positive and negative responses. Rayyan Al Shawaf, a Beirut-based writer and book critic, laments Manji's focus on how the Qur'an can be reinterpreted by liberal Muslims and not on how legal limits can be set to curb the Qur'an's influence. He also argues that Manji promotes ijtihad while overlooking that " ijtihad is a sword that cuts both ways." Al-Shawaf also laments Manji's focus "on how liberal Muslims could reinterpret the Koran as opposed to how they might set legal limits on its socio-politico-economic influence." Melik Kaylan in his review for Newsweek describes the book as "a rallying cry to Muslims" and full of "snappy phrases that hover between epigrams and slogans—effective soundbites for her supporters."
Omar Sultan Haque, a researcher and teacher at Harvard University Medical School, argues that although Manji's book is important in raising consciousness, it "fails to grapple with some of the more substantial questions that would make a future of a reality." Haque often describes Manji's ideas in a "patronizing manner". Howard A. Doughty, a professor of political economy at Seneca College, illustrates this with a quote from Haque's review: "Manji's God resembles an extremely affectionate and powerful high school guidance counselor."
Doughty, in summarizing his observations of Manji's critics says that some scholars (excluding himself) argue that "Manji may lack the gravitas to drive home her points and turn her ideas into action." He instead offers a defense of her approach and argues that "what her critics seem to miss is that her ease of communication, stripped of abstract philosophical, political and economic analysis, is precisely what allows her to turn her thoughts into other people's actions."
The international launch of Allah, Liberty and Love was met with controversy. In December 2011, Muslim extremists stormed Manji's book launch in Amsterdam; twenty-two Muslim men rushed into the venue and attempted to assault her. During Manji's book tour, police cut short her talk in Jakarta due to pressure from one of Indonesia's fundamentalist groups, the Islamic Defenders Front. A few days later, hundreds of men from the Indonesian Mujahedeen Council assaulted Manji's team and her supporters in Yogyakarta. Several people were injured and at least one had to be treated in a hospital. Shortly afterwards, the government of Malaysia banned Allah, Liberty and Love. But in September 2013, a High Court in Kuala Lumpur struck down the ban. The previous year, Nik Raina Nik Abdul Aziz, a Malay woman who was one of the managers of a Borders, was arrested for selling a translation of Manji's book before the state had announced its ban. After her three-year legal battle with the authorities, Malaysia's Federal Court ruled in her favor and dismissed the government's bid to appeal.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, describing her political leanings, Manji said, "I'm not left-wing, I'm not right-wing. I'm post-wing". She has criticized the argument that US wars inspire Islamic extremism. Manji initially supported the United States' wars in Iraq War and Afghanistan, and the George W. Bush administration's War on Terror. By 2006, her views toward the war in Iraq had become highly critical of the Bush government. On Iraq, she said she "thought the Oval Office had information that was taken into account when it made decisions." She also said, "I have been openly questioning our work in Afghanistan and the implications of it."
She argues that Palestinians face two occupations: one imposed by Hamas on women and LGBT people and the other by the Israeli forces in all of Palestine.
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