On April 29th, I drove ten miles from my home to Northfield, Illinois, a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Although geographically it’s nearby, the North Shore is another world to me.
Chicago’s North Shore has a lot in common with New York’s Westchester County. These similarities include astronomically priced homes, non-intuitive street patterns, and impossible to read at night street signs.
Irshad Manji, the self-dubbed
Muslim-Refusenik, and author of
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith
, was speaking at the Temple Jeremiah Synogogue in Northfield a couple of Saturdays ago, and I wanted to hear her presentation.
Walking in to the temple, a fifty-ish man was handing out photocopies of this
David Horowitz Front Page Magazine article. I gave him a Marathon Pundit business card--building readership one person at a time.
Here’s a revelation: Although I blog regularly about Jewish and Israeli issues, I’d never been inside a synagogue until that night. As for the synagogue, the interior was a lot like a church, except there were rows of chairs instead of pews. Obviously there was no crucifix above the altar---oh, there wasn’t an altar, either.
Two uniformed Northfield police officers looked on. Without a doubt, that was not the only security in the room.
About 300 people were in the audience, a great turnout since the event wasn’t heavily publicized, and the weather was awful that evening. The Chicago area was in the middle of what turned out to be 36 hours of almost constant rain.
After a series of introductions, Manji began her presentation. She is an dynamic speaker filled with enthusiasm.
She explained that her becoming a Muslim refusenik began as a child at a Canadian Muslim school, her madrassa (she used that term), where the instructor explained that “Muslims worship Allah, Jews worship "moolah." Moolah, of course, being the same thing Thurston Howell III worshipped on Gilligan’s Island.
Now I’ve heard about "Jews worshipping moolah" being taught at Muslims schools before. Perhaps I caught Manji on TV as I was passing by the set while running out the door to work or some other task, or more likely--but more troubling, someone else had the
same classroom experience.
My question is this: Is "Jews worship moolah" part of the required curriculum at Muslim schools?
Her madrassa also taught her women were inferior to men.
Manji confronted her madrassa instructor on many points, putting her, "a-gaynst" (in her Canadian accent) the grain of what was being taught there. At age 14, she got kicked out of the madrassa. She continued to research Islam, "in fairness to her faith," she explained, at pubic libraries. The Islam she discovered there was a less harsh faith than the one she encountered at her madrassa. And she found out about
ijtihad, the lost traditon of Islamic independent thinking.
Literalism, Manji proclaimed in her speech, is what troubles contemporary Islam. Moderate Muslims, and I guess Irshad includes herself as one, have by default allowed the Literalists--the extremists that is--to proclaim what is Islamic and what isn’t.
All faiths, she points out, have Literalists. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, only in Islam do the Literalists dominate the religion.
Manji added, perhaps jokingly, that there are even "evangelicals in the White House." She didn't say "Literalists," but the allusion was there.
Like many Muslims, she proudly talked about medieval Spain, that "there was a golden age for Muslims. "She added, perhaps, playing to the mostly Jewish crowd, that "it was a golden age there for Jews, too."
True, Jews may have lived under slightly less harsh conditions in dhimmitude than their counterparts in Christiandom. But Jews (and Christians), Manji failed to mention, as
dhimmis had to pay poll taxes to their Muslim rulers, were forced to wear distinctive infidel clothing, and non-Muslim males could not marry Muslim women.
As for the women of Islam, she mentioned that women are viewed as property, from birth, to marriage, to widow-hood in contemporary Saudi Arabia. There, Manji quipped, women have the legal status of a car. But women, she added aren't permitted to drive in the kingdom
Manji later talked ot the long history of interpretation and re-evaluation within the Islamic faith, that she feels that forgotten tradition will be the savior of Islam. Discussion groups inspired by her book, according to Irshad, have been formed throughout the Muslim world, which is amazing, as
The Trouble With Islam Today is banned in most Muslim states. There are free
Urdu, Arabic, and
Persian downloads of her book available on her Muslim-Refusenik site.
The importance of non-Muslims questioning extremist postions of Muslims is cannot be ignored, according to Manji. Seemingly, Muslims, have the perfect cop-out when being confronted by those outside the faith.
Muslims scold non-Mulims, in her words with admonitions such as "since you are not of the culture (Islam), you cannot criticize the culture."
"Next time a Muslim confronts you with that line," Irshad countered, "tell them, if you are not an American, or not in the US Military, then by your reasoning, that means you can’t criticize the American actions at the Abu Grahib prison."
I have to remember that retort.
Question and answer time came around, and I asked if Ms. Manji was familiar with the
Thomas Klocek case at DePaul University. Klocek, a longtime adjunct professor at the Chicago Catholic school, was fired by DePaul after some Muslim students complained to the school administration after he called into question such staments such as "the Israelis are the same as the Nazis" in regards to the issue of the Palestinian territories.
She replied that "she hadn’t heard about that incident, but what happened exemplified the 'climate of fear' within academia over these controversial subjects."
Well, she knows about Klocek now.
I mentioned to her that I was a signee of the petition, the
Manifesto Against a New Totalitarianism, that can be viewed on her web site. She and the other original 12 signees, promptly received a death threat from the British Muslim site
Ummah.com.And speaking of DePaul, Irhad Manji would be a perfect speaker for DePaul when their fall quarter starts in September.
Oh, I almost forgot, there is this curious comment by Manji about that petition.
Only one person emailed a disconcerting message. A gentleman named Norman Finkelstein wrote to say, "Is there a petition supporting the death threats?" Maybe he's just a researcher
Perhaps a prank by one of Norman's enemies? Or someone with the same name? Or could Manji's Norman Finkelstein be the
same one who is a DePaul University polical science professor and a man the Anti-Defamation League has called a holocaust-denier?
Technorati tags: Islam Terrorism Irshad Manji DePaul Thomas Klocek Norman Finkelstein Jewish Religion Muslim Women الإسلام عربي اسلامی فارسی Chicago
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