Why Muslims in the West should speak out on human rights
August 31, 2004
Muslims and non-Muslims have a role to play in the reform of Islam, writes Irshad Manji.
I am a Muslim refusenik. That doesn't mean I refuse to be a Muslim; it simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah.
I have not walked away from my faith and become a secular North American as so many of my fellow Muslims have done. But I remain a struggling Muslim because of the many human rights abuses in Islamist - note that I do not say Islamic - regions: the treatment of women, the Jew-bashing, the slavery. It is precisely because I believe in the universality of human rights that I do not believe any culture, any ethnicity, any religion ought to be immune from scrutiny.
Had I grown up in an Islamic country, I'd probably be an atheist in my heart. It's because I live in the West, where I can think, dispute and delve further into any topic, that I've learned why I shouldn't give up on Islam just yet.
I've thought lately that I should have called my book "The Trouble With Islam today". Because my book reminds my fellow Muslims that there was once in Islam a tradition of independent thinking. This is ijtihad. It sounds a lot like jihad to non-Arab ears, and indeed comes from the same root, to struggle. But unlike violent struggle, ijtihad is all about independent thinking and independent reasoning.
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