Irshad Manji, your fifteen minutes are up

I don’t know what inspired me to finally—in about two hours—read TV host Irshad Manji’s fraudulent, confused and contradictory opus The Trouble with Islam. The book has achieved great success in Canada and even some actual intellectual recognition in Britain and the United States. I saw an ad in the New York Review of Books, in which Manji, who was in Canada known as a radical before she joined the Daniel Pipes crowd, is appearing at some haughty symposium alongside such doyens of the liberal intelligentsia as Tony Kushner.

Page 36
Q-News, Issue 358
December 2004

The fact is that Manji is an opportunist, not a feminist or a secularist, but a confused little bourgeois with an axe to grind. She has been used by the Israeli lobby against the very beliefs she professes to have. Those who know her are not so puzzled at her transformation. She was always more ambitious than idealist, and when being a professional feminist-progressive only netted her a TV hosting gig on television, being a Muslim Zionist who actually isn’t one (maybe she is, she’s not sure) has brought some money to the left publishers that put out her unreadable Rorty-ite pragmatism not three years ago.

When Manji’s book was released, my friend, in feminist solidarity with Manji bought a copy. I knew my friend had no illusions about how Manji was already being touted by Daniel Pipes as the bespectacled Lesbian Muslim Feminist Martin Luther. As she told me, “I just want to read her story.”

What intrigued me at the time, was Manji’s bibliography and footnotes, and the skimming I did equally indebted to Eqhbal Ahmed and Bernard Lewis, Paul Wolfowitz and Tariq Ali, Neocons and Pakistani socialists. Not surprisingly, the few passages I read seemed to combine the rationalist critique of Muslim leftists with the racist critique of Zionists, in a manner that may seem perfectly sensible to Manji in a glass house in Toronto. Simone Weil, after all, the German proto-feminist who was Jewish and incredibly Judeophobic actually thought the Nazis would let her go, because of her hatred of everything Jewish. I get the same vibe from Manji. Using both left and right critiques of Islamism only underscores the old anti-semitic “Jews are capitalists and communists.”

Without having gone through the due diligence of actually reading the book, I said, hell, I’ll just write her and try to get some information or admissions out of her. After a first e-mail in which I asked her why, if she was so interested in building secularism in the Muslim community, she was affiliating with the anti-secularist, right wing anti-Palestinian Zionists like Daniel Pipes. I mentioned that I didn’t necessarily have a problem with her book title. Finally, I mentioned that in calling herself a Muslim Refusenik, she was playing on how the word was in the popular imagination due to the current round of Israeli Refuseniks—those who refuse military service—and thus, why has she not, in her public appearances, supported those refuseniks? I feel some identification with Manji, as a Jew who critiques my own, but I would never go overboard and work with, say, a Nazi. Manji has no problem working with those who believe Muslims are evil; she was even interviewed by the 700 Club.

She wrote me back with as many confused, dimwitted contradictions in her appearance—a Pakistani Lesbian Feminist who hates Terrorists (something out of satire)—on Bill O’Reilly, in which she acted, and continues to act in support of the anti-Muslim, American regime that empowers the very radical Islam that she purports to inveigh against. She wanted to make it clear that she was not at all a spokesperson for the America or Israel, and she wrote this in a manner that seemingly doth protest too much, but with a tinge of sincerity—as in the knowledge that she was allowing herself to be used. Likewise, she claims to be very critical of Ariel Sharon and that she “has always supported the refuseniks.” She claimed that Daniel Pipes “felt very badly about what he said in the past and has moved to a more progressive position.” Only recently, Pipes wrote an article criticising Sharon from the right.

I followed up by asking Manji to publicly criticise the Israeli government and support the Refuseniks, if she truly believed in such a cause. Having someone of her stature, even with some of her inherent flaws, would be a boon to her mostly Jewish and White readers, achieving what someone she purports to admire—Tariq Ali—achieves: critiquing both Islamism and Zionism, publicly and forthrightly. I reminded her that her overall view of building secularism and progressive thought in the Muslim world was completely polluted by her affiliation with Zionists. I ended the note with professional respect and regard for many of our mutual friends. I have not heard from her since.

A few months later, my fellow Torontonian Justin Podur wrote on his ZNet blog about his own similar encounter with Manji after giving her book a magisterial smack-down, calling it a “multifaceted fraud.” He asked her at one of her speaking engagements, on behalf of the International Solidarity Movement, to visit Palestine so she could balance it with the perspective of the Canada Israel Committee, who had been sending her on many a fancy vacation to Israel. At first, she seemed willing, but only if the ISM, a solidarity movement, would foot her bills and allow her to “observe” them. In other words, she was already bought and paid for by the far-richer Zionists, so those poor Palestinians wouldn’t get squat.

If the reader is wondering, she has still, nearly a year later, not made one public utterance in support of Palestinians, while she regularly vacations in Israel, and has become a Canadian “Pro-Israel” TV pundit who argues the Zionist position with as much ferocity as Charles Krauthammer. Her book? A sad story of a sad woman who had a sad childhood and is now sticking it to her dad by not only going secularist but zionist too. How do you like that, pops? I feel sorry for her. She is at her fourteenth minute, without a doubt.