By Geraldine Bedell
She is a lesbian feminist Muslim whose ambition is nothing less than to reform Islam. She has been compared by the New York Times to Martin Luther; by others to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and, when I met her, casually, by herself, to Vaclav Havel.
Irshad Manji, a spiky - haired, opinionated, mouthy Canadian Muslim, lives in New York behind bulletproof glass and doesn't use a mobile phone because it would make finding her too easy. She has a lot of enemies: her book, The Trouble With Islam Today, is banned across much of the Middle East. But it is also a bestseller in many countries, including the US, and has been downloaded in its Arabic, Farsi and Urdu translations more than half-a-million times. In the last couple of weeks, she has been in Washington advising Democrats on Capitol Hill about a potential Obama administration's policy towards the Muslim world and reminding the National Organisation for Women to speak out against human-rights abuses perpetrated under cover of religion. Her recent documentary, Faith Without Fear, has just been nominated for an Emmy. Read more ...
She is a lesbian feminist Muslim whose ambition is nothing less than to reform Islam. She has been compared by the New York Times to Martin Luther; by others to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and, when I met her, casually, by herself, to Vaclav Havel.
Irshad Manji, a spiky - haired, opinionated, mouthy Canadian Muslim, lives in New York behind bulletproof glass and doesn't use a mobile phone because it would make finding her too easy. She has a lot of enemies: her book, The Trouble With Islam Today, is banned across much of the Middle East. But it is also a bestseller in many countries, including the US, and has been downloaded in its Arabic, Farsi and Urdu translations more than half-a-million times. In the last couple of weeks, she has been in Washington advising Democrats on Capitol Hill about a potential Obama administration's policy towards the Muslim world and reminding the National Organisation for Women to speak out against human-rights abuses perpetrated under cover of religion. Her recent documentary, Faith Without Fear, has just been nominated for an Emmy. Read more ...
Source: The Observer
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