The National Post is conducting a search to find Canada's most important "public intellectual" -- which we define as a thinker who has shown distinction in his or her own field, and can communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it. In today's instalment, Salim Mansur profiles dissident Muslim expert Irshad Manji. Other profiles, as well as contest rules, appear at www.nationalpost.com/ beautifulminds.

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When Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam swiftly climbed the best-seller list in the fall of 2003, she found herself thrust into the Canadian and international spotlight.

Since then, Manji has become a key Muslim voice on the world stage, striving to explore a culture and civilization whose inward collapse has given rise to a militant creed at war with the modern world. Along with her book, commentaries appearing in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, the National Post, The Globe and Mail and elsewhere have left fundamentalist Muslims furious.

Manji's book is partly polemics and partly a frank effort to describe the Muslim faith she was born into. Having journeyed through the culture shaped by that faith, she has acquired insights into the Islamic world that only an insider could possess. She knows instinctively and by experience the plight of Muslim women within a traditional culture that often tends toward misogyny. As someone who came of age in Canada -- her parents were compelled to migrate from Uganda, then under the control of notorious despot Idi Amin -- Manji is very much the face of the new Canada as well.

Her emergence as a serious scholar and critic of Islam could not have been better timed. In the post-9/11 world, there is an urgently felt need to understand what Tunisian scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb described as "the malady of Islam." Manji's writings have met this need. Even as her views have sparked controversy, her voice has articulated the concerns felt by countless Muslims -- particularly younger ones -- who are aghast at the violence that has occurred in the name of their religion.

A public intellectual, in my view, is one who walks into the sound and fury of contemporary discord, stakes out his or her turf, and engages opponents by putting forward informed and well-reasoned arguments. It requires stamina, a love of learning, a gift for elegant writing, wit, intelligence and, above all, courage.

Manji has ably demonstrated those attributes. But it is her courage, in particular, that distinguishes her from her peers.

The world of Islam has long been engaged in an ugly and violent internal conflict. It is only in the final decades of the last century that this conflict has gone global. Those who face the greatest individual threat are Muslims who publicly question the nature and direction in which their faith is headed, and who are unwilling to assign blame to outsiders for the malady within. Manji has not allowed any fear of retribution to silence her.

In this regard, she is in the company of Muslim women such as Fatima Mernissi of Morocco, Assia Djebar of Algeria, Shirin Ebadi and Azar Nafisi of Iran, Asma Jehangir of Pakistan, Aymaan al-Hirsi of Somalia and Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh, who similarly have defied threats from their religious compatriots to speak of human rights and freedom. And she has emerged as the composite face of a new generation with whom rests the hope for Muslim reformation.