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Her answer to her own question is guilelessly to challenge certain givens. The Koran mandates the veiling of the wives of the Prophet. So why are all women now required to be covered from head to foot? In the distant past, Islam integrated and celebrated human diversity, and honored Christian and Jewish culture. So why has Islam degenerated into a maelstrom of the most virulent anti-Semitism? ''Let there be no compulsion in religion,'' says Chapter 2 of the Koran. So why do many Arab Muslim states persecute or ostracize nonbelievers?
Manji wants to know why some extraordinary statements of Muslim intolerance are dismissed or ignored. She writes: ''Here's a passage straight out of an Arabic-language textbook distributed by the Saudis to Muslim schoolchildren in America: 'The unbelievers, idolaters and others like them must be hated and despised. . . . We must stay away from them and create barriers between us and them.' '' This textbook is being read in America. Why? And why isn't there a groundswell of outrage among American Muslims about this kind of message? Or, for that matter, by American non-Muslims?
Of course, Manji will be widely dismissed. She is a young woman and she is a lesbian. She loves the West, its freedoms and its opportunities. She has visited Israel and found it more open, more self-critical, more admirable than its Arab Muslim neighbors. She is clearly and primarily an individualist, a person who thinks for herself. It will be asked, as it is asked of many Westerners, why she simply cannot accept that religion is not about reason. Why doesn't she simply cease being a Muslim? Or why doesn't she simply submit?
Her answer is a straightforward and moving one. She wants to embrace her faith by understanding it fully, by realizing its vision of human equality, by resuscitating the ancient Islamic tradition of ijtihad: questioning, asking, thinking. Like gay Christians demanding accountability from their faith, she is not content to have Scripture read to her and then be told to shut up. She refuses to be treated like an idiot. Sure, when she reads about women being stoned for adultery or gay people being murdered by religious fanatics, she is tempted merely to leave, to wash her hands. ''But each time I reached the brink of excommunicating myself, I pulled back. Not out of fear. Out of fairness -- to myself. One question begged for more thought: If the all-knowing, all-powerful God didn't wish to make me a lesbian, then why didn't he make someone else in my place?''
I'm glad he didn't. Manji's prescriptions for change in Islam -- Western loans to Muslim businesswomen, for example -- seem dwarfed by the scale of the problem. She barely touches the difficult topic of American foreign policy as a critical aspect of the defanging of Islamism. She can be a little glib at times, a little too fond of her own tone of voice and of her smart-aleck phrasemaking. But her plea endures because it is so clearly genuine. One question she asks reverberates in my mind: ''What if Mohamed Atta had been raised on soul-stretching questions instead of simple certitudes?''
The relationship between the state of contemporary Islam and the mass murderers of Al Qaeda is not a simple one; but it surely exists. In the voice of this young woman, you can hear the willingness to ask why, and how the situation can be remedied. You can hear, in fact, the distinct tone of liberalism, a liberalism that seeks not to abolish faith but to establish a new relationship with it. If we survive this current war without unthinkable casualties, it will be because that kind of liberalism didn't lose its nerve. Think of Manji as a nerve ending for the West -- shocking, raw, but mercifully, joyously, still alive.
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Time.
