ORONTO ó As a Canadian Muslim, Irshad Manji never eats pork, never drinks alcohol and regularly reads the Koran. Otherwise she is Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare.
At 35, Ms. Manji, a lesbian intellectual with spiky hair and a sharp tongue, is an outspoken television journalist who admires Israel and applauds the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein. More than that, she has issued a searing critique of her religion in a new book, "The Trouble with Islam" (Random House Canada), calling for radical change.
While every religion has its fundamentalists, she notes, "only in Islam is literalism in the mainstream," a recipe for generating hatreds that can spawn suicide bombers.
There are other Islamic liberals who say the Sept. 11 attackers did more than hijack four planes: they hijacked an entire religion. Ms. Manji goes much further, saying that Islam has deep-rooted problems with Jews, women, slavery and authoritarianism that go back centuries. Her goal is a thoroughly liberal reform, started by Muslims living in the West.
"If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it's now," she argues in her book. "If we're sincere about fighting the asphyxiating despotism" that Al Qaeda seeks to spread, she adds, "we can't be afraid to ask: What if the Koran isn't perfect? What if it's not a completely God-authored book? What if it's riddled with human biases?"
As a longtime broadcaster and public affairs talk-show host on Canadian television, Ms. Manji, prominent, articulate and telegenic, with a rapid-fire delivery, has a ready platform for her ideas.
These ideas have already set off a searching debate. In the first weeks after publication of her book, she has made front-page news across Canada and received immediate attention in Germany, where the book was also released. In the next few months the book will reach the United States (St. Martin's Press), Australia, other parts of Europe and most probably Israel.
The book has also provoked death threats.
She takes no chances. Conversing in her Toronto living room, fidgeting, with a cup of spicy Indian tea in hand, Ms. Manji gushes with arguments as a hefty bodyguard stands on the porch. She has put bulletproof glass in some windows. She insists that her house not be described in detail to avoid giving a hint of where she lives.
Her central call is for Muslims to join her in critical thinking.
"If Mohamed Atta, who was well educated in Germany, had grown up with questions rather than just glib answers," she said, "maybe then he would have stepped back before immolating himself and committing mass murder" on Sept. 11, 2001, in the attacks that he helped organize.
As much as anything, she emphasizes, her thirst is for inquiry, something she says she admires in Israeli society. The goal is to "create conversations where they have never occurred before."
It is working. The immediate reply is as fiery as her own high-octane critique.
"The book title should be `The Trouble with Irshad Manji,' " said Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, dismissing her as a "media darling."
"She calls herself a good Muslim even though she is a lesbian and a feminist," he added. "She will have a shadow over her interpretation."
Written in essay form as a conversational letter to "my fellow Muslims," Ms. Manji tells of her "personal clash of civilizations," beginning with her family's flight to Canada in 1972 from her native Uganda when Idi Amin expelled the local East Indian community.
She comes from an upper-middle-class family (her father and brothers ran a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Uganda), but also a troubled home in which her father once chased her with a knife.
A questioning child, she had repeated run-ins with the teacher of her Islamic school in a Vancouver suburb. She finally became so disgusted with his anti-Semitic rants, she wrote, that she bolted from the class.
