Re: Irshad Manji
I’m just wondering how many ppl here have actually read her book… as opposed to those who deem their public esteem to be besmirched by this lesbian ijtihadi. Truth be said, most of the negative viewpoints that I have observed are merely indicative of outright denial – why haven’t there been more attempts to rationally refute her thoughts… and thoughts they are… her book is full of conjectures and personal experiences.
I wish I had the time to enlist my comments here in one post but I don’t… but here’s a starting point:
As I remember it off the top of my head, she tries to strengthen her position by constantly quoting Edward Said and by summarizing his classic “Orientalism”. That being said, as I was reading her book, I really started thinking that she hadn’t really read Edward Said. A case in point was when she talks about the West's supposed tendency to colonize Muslims. On the contrary though, Said talks about actual colonization - he talked about the British colonial conquests.
Also, she portrays Afghanistan's women as symbolic of the oppression by Islamic regimes, but no where in her book or her website is there any mention of how some women in that country have been resisting this brutality – the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has been pretty successful in its recent endeavors and I think Manji needs to read Anne Brodsky's book entitled 'With All Our Strength'.
I’d like to hear more from someone who has read the book.