I am sure he is shaking in his sandals over this one.
Irshad Manji, Osama’s worst nightmare
Irshad Manji,
a lesbian feminist Muslim and, say many, one of the bravest women
alive, has revealed the horrors of the first time it sunk in how
barbaric her own religion could be: she was aged 10 and her father was
chasing her through the house with a kitchen knife.
Manji, who
has received numerous death threats as a result of her campaign to
highlight how Islam oppresses millions of its followers, had threatened
to report her father to the police for the way he regularly beat his
wife.
Born in 1968 in Idi Amin's Uganda, but living in Canada
when the attack happened, Manji escaped to a hiding place on the roof.
There, she tells the Observer, she had an epiphany. "I
realised I was grateful because there were people I could go to, talk
to, whereas if we'd still been in East Africa that may not have been
the case.
"I realised I lived in a society where the story of who
we are as a people was not finished, which meant that I, as an
individual, mattered. I could be a partial author of this grander
story."
Manji, who now lives in New York behind bulletproof
windows and dares not own a mobile phone in case it can be used to
track her down, is best known for her book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, published in 2004. It has been a huge bestseller in the West but has been banned across most of the Middle East. The New York Times has compared her to Martin Luther and called her "Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare".
In
the new interview, she says that a much later moment of realisation
came when she was working at a religious television station and her
(Jewish) boss put a newspaper cutting on her desk. It was the story of
a young woman in northern Nigeria who had been sentenced by a sharia
court to 180 lashes for a sexual offence, even though she had seven
male witnesses to testify that she had been raped. Her boss had
scribbled in the margin: "Irshad, one of these days you'll tell me how
you reconcile this kind of insanity and female genital mutilation with
your Muslim faith."
Manji, who is a professor at New York
University and hasn't seen her father for more than 20 years, may just
be about to become an even more influential figure. She recently spent
a fortnight in Washington advising senior Democrats on what policies
towards the Muslim world a Barack Obama administration might adopt.
I am pretty sure this is his worst nightmare.