Can Islam be reformed?

To the West, she says, "Wake up!" To Islam, she says, "Grow up!" With these words, Irshad Manji, a Uganda-born Canadian Muslim, is calling for an Islamic reformation. Her views are bravely and brilliantly articulated in The Trouble with Islam, the New York Times bestseller first published in Canada last fall and now flying off bookshop shelves around the world.

"In the Muslim world, there is a deep hunger for change," Manji told me recently. "The challenge for people like me is to figure out how that underground hunger for change can be turned into an above the ground phenomenon."

Far from being the monolith Westerners suppose, there is much discontent among contemporary Muslims, Manji tells me, particularly among the young. "Not solely because of September 11, but more urgently because of it, we've got to end Islam's totalitarianism, particularly the gross human-rights violations against women and religious minorities," she said. "If there ever was a moment for Islamic reformation, it's now."

For Islam's contemporary and historic problems, she places the blame squarely where it belongs. "You know what I find instructive about the fall of Moorish Spain?" she asks. "That it didn't crumble because of ravenous Christians. Oh sure, Christians scooped up the pieces, but the brutes who brought down Muslim Spain were Muslims. Our problems started with us. To this day, Muslims use the white man as a weapon of mass distraction a distraction from the fact that we've never needed the 'oppressive' West to oppress our own."

While the truth is what ultimately sets prisoners free, the price for Manji's candor has been high: she's had to install bullet-proof glass in her home and she occasionally requires a bodyguard.

Such terror has been reigning elsewhere in Canada as well, most recently with the Khadr family. "Young Muslims like Adurahman Rahim Khadr are still feeling they cannot go public with their struggles with the faith, with the prejudices that are being imposed upon them," Manji says. "Too many Muslims are saying to me that, because they are being told they cannot be Western and Muslim at the same time, they are fearing persecution if they speak up against that." Persecution? "Physical reprisals against themselves and their families."

But it's no use telling young Muslims that life in the West is simply a temptation to be avoided, she says. Without reform, Islam will remain a religion with plenty of faith and absolutely no hope. Threatening, torturing, maiming, and killing dissenting voices, and suicide bombing, only adds to the body count.

Having grown up in Richmond B.C. in what she says was a 'miserable' Muslim family in a miserable culture where men seemed incapable of using the 'L'word, the 35-year-old lesbian journalist knows what she's talking about. The result is this hugely important insider's account, breathtaking for its blow-your-hair-back honesty.

"I wanted to be informed, not indoctrinated," she says of her experience at her local madrassa (notorious for teaching children to be martyrs and to hate the West, Christians, and Jews) where her questions led to her expulsion, though her belief in God and in Islam remained strong. The abuses of Islam, she contends, are not due to the Quran which she has often found contradictory and confusing, but to wrong-thinking imams and egoistic despots such as Yasser Arafat whose leadership of the Palestinians she views as their biggest handicap.

She also revels in the freedoms of Canada which she credits for providing her with the climate to free herself from the thinking that imprisons so many contemporary Muslims. But she questions the Canadian government's handling of Islamist terrorism.

"The Canadian government has known for years that our country is a haven of sleeper cells ... and we've done absolutely nothing about it. If anything, we tip-toe around the issue, too afraid to even acknowledge it for fear of irritating one of these sleeper cells and supposedly bringing terrorism upon ourselves. This really makes me wonder: Where are these supposedly glorious Canadian values that we thought we were exporting to the rest of the world through our embrace of soft non-military power? Tolerance of intolerance isn't tolerance at all. Why are we letting off the hook those individuals who claim to represent multiculturalism but, in fact, whose very activities in Canada undermine the flourishing of multiculturalism?"

She has personally witnessed sermons at University of Toronto, she says, where young Muslims were incited to bring jihad to Canada. Yet when she reports such events to relevant authorities, all is denied and nothing is done to stop it.

Such naivete and apathy is dangerous, she warns. "I wake up every morning thanking God that I wound up in a country in which, as a Muslim woman, I can dream big dreams and tap most of my potential," she says. "I say this because I know what the alternative is to the freedoms I have lived in Canada, and the alternatives ain't pretty, let me assure you."

While Manji's campaign is heroic, the question is, can Islam be reformed? At present, everywhere in the world that Islam and any other religious group are in contact, whether in the Philippines or Indonesia, through Malaysia, into Pakistan through the Mideast, into east Africa and the Sudan, across to Nigeria, given the opportunity, Muslims oppress, murder, violate, and destroy non-Muslim peoples. This is incontrovertibly so and such actions are supported by Islamic clergy everywhere. This violence is religiously embedded within Islam and existed from its origin. Ignoring this will not alter the reality.

The truth may be as G. K. Chesterton suggested, that in theory and in practice, Western thought and Islam are intrinsically inimical.

Historically, the Catholic Church has been the moral authority in the West. But with the gradual weakening of the Church's moral influence, due to the pernicious effects of secularism and wanton liberalism, the West no longer has the moral power which once protected it from enemies. Muslims view with contempt the Christian inability to stem the tide of sexual degradation, made worse by embedding such degradation in law as rights. Of this, they quite rightly want no part.

Which is why Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc anticipated that, as the West lost its moral power and force, Islam would rise again to fill the breach; and that, despite all the lies currently being told about Islam, these two forces--Christianity and Islam--like Cain and Abel, can never be reconciled.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England, where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.