The Trouble with Islam Today | Irshad Manji | Talks at Google

hello thank you everyone for making here today it's my pleasure to introduce Irshad Manji your shot was born in Uganda and fled with her family in 1972 to Vancouver as a refugee from the regime of Idi Amin when she was 24 she became the national affairs editorialist for the Ottawa Citizen and the youngest person to sit on the editorial board of a Canadian daily newspaper today Assad's columns appear frequently in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London as a social entrepreneur irshad founded project a sheet on an initiative to revive Islam's under tradition of critical thinking debate and dissent type of discourse we value highly here at Google she's also been a visiting fellow at Yale University's International Security Studies program and recently Oprah Winfrey Oprah Winfrey honored irshad with the first annual chutzpah award for audacity nerve boldness and conviction I hope you'll listen with open minds to what your shot has to say to us today and be prepared for a lively discussion following her words in video please welcome your shut Michael Michael I'm not gonna let you go that quickly come back up here for a quick second okay so there were two words in that introduction that we're going to no no that's okay that's okay cuz you know what I can't expect you to know one of them which is HD had which I will talk a little bit about later today but the other one that actually has made its way into popular you know vernacular in America is hot spot exactly and he got it he got it right away right it was just a momentary flub so let's give him another round of applause are we alright you think okay that was a hesitant yes well first of all good afternoon everybody and to the Muslims in the audience Ramadan Mubarak and Salam and alaykum to to the Jews in the audience shallow and to the atheists in the audience how the hell are ya it's a real pleasure to be here I'm quite quite excited about being here this afternoon I flew in from Toronto this morning actually I want to offer up a disclaimer right up front and not to make it an overly personal talk but if I'm feeling a little bit woozy or you you know see me as a little bit slow on the uptake today I'm gonna chalk it up to being medicated being drugged because I had a fairly major surgery late last week and wasn't at all sure that I would be able to make it today but obviously here I am and feeling actually pretty good at the moment and if I need to sit down at any point you'll know why but that's the disclaimer I wanted to offer this this afternoon I want to tell all of you not just in this room but even those who are joining us from Chicago a story a very different story about Islam and it's a story that you're not gonna hear from mainstream media but it's also a story you're not gonna readily hear from mainstream Muslims and in the course of telling this story I also want to show why I believe Islam and innovation are eminently compatible and in fact need to be that much more compatible if we are going to spread the good word the gospel if you will of critical thinking and independent reasoning throughout more of the world let me begin that story by saying just a little bit more about myself so I can introduce myself properly a bit more of my own story if you will as Michael mentioned my family and I are refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda right small country in East Africa we settled just outside of Vancouver in 1972 and I grew up attending two types of schools the regular secular public school of most North American kids and then on top of that every Saturday for several hours at a stretch the Islamic religious school known as the madrasa and that is where I regularly imbibe two major messages from my teacher one was that women are inferior and the other was that the Jews are treacherous not to be trusted now in both cases I remember at a very young age asking a very simple question why and I'll tell you why I even bothered to ask that question because what I was being told didn't match the reality on the ground there was a huge cognitive dissonance and I needed to understand whether what was being fed to me was theory which has limited value or reality which is experience hard experience for example when my madrasa teacher told us that you know the Jews worship mullah not Allah meaning money not God that they're all consumed with business I said to myself really as in the real world because I looked around my multicultural multiracial neighborhood just south of Vancouver and I noticed something fascinating all of the new business signs being put out were in Asian languages Korean Japanese Mandarin Cantonese Hindi Punjabi or do not Hebrew and not Yiddish or do and even back then I recall thinking to myself wait a minute you know maybe the Jews aren't consumed with business any more than we age ins are well that moment actually proved to be one of moral reckoning for me because it then led to probably the most seminal question of my entire life and one that has followed me to this very day and that question is what if I'm not being educated at the madrasa what if I'm being indoctrinated a crucial distinction education versus indoctrination education unleashes the opportunity to use our minds critically indoctrination squelches the opportunity to think critically and as I mentioned that question and thus that distinction has followed me to this very day it seeped itself into my soul into my conscience and even into my professional life it's probably the reason I decided I would have to become a journalist and it led me altum Utley to writing the book that has brought me to the attention of the people who pull together the author's program here at Google and the book as you know by now is entitled the trouble with Islam today a Muslims call for reform in her faith I realize it's a title that rankles many many Muslims it wasn't chosen for that reason but I stand by it for reasons I can give during the Q&A if anybody is interested but here's the point what do I mean by the trouble with Islam today in a word I mean literalism an unquestioning uncritical unthinking approach to faith so unthinking that it actually degenerates faith it turns faith into dogma faith it seems to me is secure enough to handle questions faith never needs to be threatened by questions whereas dogma of any kind on the left on the right in religious communities in ideological communities from feminism to socialism capitalism dogma of any stripe is always threatened by questions because dogma by definition is brittle and rigid and it snaps under the spotlight of scrutiny and therefore at least in my view deserves to be threatened by questions now I want to acknowledge as I do in my book I want to acknowledge here today every religion has its share of literalists American Christianity has its evangelicals some of whom whom still populate the White House you know many of them have left but some are still there Jews have their ultra-orthodox Buddhist for God's sakes have fundamentalists though don't ask me how that one works that may be another book for another author and if I may inject some cheap Buddhist humor for another lifetime thank you so much I really appreciate that chuckle but the difference is that only within Islam today is literalism mainstream worldwide and let me explain what I mean by that admittedly sweeping and loaded statement we Muslims even here in the West are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran Islam Scripture was revealed after the Torah and the Bible it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God's will okay not given to the ambiguities and inconsistencies and outright contradictions and God forbid human editing like all of those other so-called sacred texts no no even moderate Muslims believe as an article of faith that the Koran is not like any other holy book it is if I can put it this way God 3.00 and none shall come after it okay so glad that one got a laugh at Google because really guys you know you're a tough crowd you're a tough crowd I have to say no matter how you slice it this is a supremacy complex about scripture and it's a supremacy complex that is dangerous why do I say dangerous for two reasons first this supremacy complex about the Quran disproportionately empowers the radical fringe in my faith the violent jihad ease and notice that I call them a fringe that they are but they are also disproportionately empowered and this leads me to the second reason that the supremacy complex about the Quran is dangerous it inhibits the reasonable center the moderates from asking hard questions about what happens when faith becomes Dogma you see the jihadis the violent jihadis are so expert at isolating passages in the Quran and then quoting them to support their violence and the rest of us have just internalized this belief that we cannot question the holy and perfect text of the Quran after all it is perfect and therefore to openly challenge the violent jihad ease is to challenge the Quran itself since they quote from the Quran and that's supposed to be off-limits questioning the Quran itself well I wrote this book in order to show that in fact it is permissible to ask questions of the Holy Quran and no not because a spiky-haired feminist Canadian raised you know Muslim woman named Irshad Manji says so okay mullahs don't care what somebody who looks like me have to say younger Muslims care but mullahs don't I say that it is permissible to ask questions of the Quran because Islamic tradition tells us so Islam has a glorious tradition of independent thinking and creative reasoning debate and dissent and it is known as HD had and I'm just gonna spell that word for all of you because sometimes it's easy to wrap your head around a new concept when you can actually visualize the main word behind it IJ TI h a d HT had Islam's tradition of independent thinking I realize of course that this word sounds uncomfortably like jihad to many non Arab ears and in fact it comes from the same root to struggle which is what by the way jihad means not violent struggle but struggle but unlike any notion of violent struggle HD had is all about struggling with the mind to comprehend the complex and broader world and far from being mere theory HD HOD has a track record you know in the early centuries of Islam thanks to the spirit of HD had a hundred and thirty-five schools of interpretation flourished in Muslim Spain scholars would teach their students to abandon quote expert opinion about the Quran if their own conversations with the living breathing Quran not the straight forward and literal book as if somehow it's dead but the living breathing fluid could on if their own conversations with that came up with a better evidence for their peaceful ideas and in Cordoba one of the most sophisticated cities in Muslim Spain there were seventy libraries let me put this in perspective for you that rivals a number of libraries in most cosmopolitan cities today New York City for example at last check has about seventy seven branches of its public library well guess what the Islamic world had this a thousand years ago and you know so much of what we in this part of the world just assume is the product of secular European culture or even judeo-christian culture was in fact shaped by believing Muslims I'll give you a quick partial list because I think you folks on this campus would appreciate this Muslims gave the world one of the first institutions of higher learning at least in the West it was known as the house of wisdom and it sprang up in 9th century Baghdad Muslims gave the world I'll think you really love this mocha coffee it's true and you are welcome Starbucks Muslims gave the world an early version of the guitar you'd never know it given how often will now say that you know music is haraam or forbidden Muslims even gave the world that ultra Spanish expression la which has its root in the Arabic word anybody Olay Allah see the guy who laughs at my jokes is also the one who comes up with the right answer I think I'm liking you you're right Olay comes from the Arabic word Allah and I'm just gonna sidetrack here for a quick minute because I have a what I think is a funny story but you guys will be the ultimate judges of that I know about a year ago well Michael mentioned to you that I was a visiting fellow at Yale University I gave a series of lectures at Yale and in one of those lectures I said to the auditorium you know full of people what Arabic word could you imagine the Spanish word Olay coming from dead silence Ivy League university all right I said fight I'm gonna give you guys a hint and I looked heavenward and I cupped my hands out and I whispered Oh lay more dead silence punctuated this time by the shifting of bums in seats there was a great deal of discomfort in the air obviously I said fine I'm gonna kick it up a notch and give you one final hint and I was about to drop to my knees but thought better of it and just raised my head up and practically yelled Olay and some clown at the back of the auditorium yelled back oil so to mangle a Chinese proverb you know that you live in very interesting times when the word oil could be considered an Arabic word number one and then the Arabic word for God number two but you know I won't push the analogy too much further than that back to the point at hand ladies and gentlemen which is this that I think the beauty of emphasizing HD had Islam's tradition of independent thinking is that it is endemic to Islam itself in other words I'm not asking my fellow Muslims to import a foreign tradition or an alien virtue into the faith not at all people like me and there are many others like me HD Hadees as we call ourselves are reminding our fellow Muslims that Islam itself once offered and exhibited this glorious tradition of progressive rural istic thinking and that there is no reason safe for pure politics we cannot have it again and indeed we're arguing that we must have it again if we are going to update Islamic practices for the 21st century and it's not just about rediscovering HD had this mission that we're on it's actually about something more than that it's about popularizing it and democratizing this tradition so that as many people throughout the Muslim world women especially know that it is their god-given right to think for themselves now in order to get there I'll tell you that I and a group of reform minded Muslims have started something called Project HD HUD and this is a Payne literally to restore critical thinking to the practice of Islam and the way it all came about actually was not an initiative that I came up with I would not have had the imagination to do that I must tell you what happened was immediately after my book came out in English of course because of the bursts of international publicity it received my email inbox overflowed with messages from young Muslims in the Arab world asking me a question when are you gonna get this book translated into Arabic so that we can share these ideas with our friends whom they assured me were hungry for honest conversation about Islam since they live lives of daily censorship both in their households and in their societies and my standard answer to them was come on name one Arab publisher that'll have the guts to translate this book let alone circulate it what are you kidding me and most of these kids to their credit wrote back to say well so what you're sad I mean you're right but so what you get the book translated into Arabic you then post that translation on your website and when we can download it free of charge as a PDF right they were young but not born yesterday you know what I'm saying when we can read it as a PDF that means that we will be able to read it in privacy and therefore safety something we wouldn't have if we were carrying a physical copy of the book around with us and that in turn means we will create the opportunities to share these ideas with our friends I love their logic you know the privilege I have in this part of the world to use my voice can then be exercised to help others find their voices if that isn't a quintessential example of global interdependence I don't know what is but did it work nice and theory didn't work I took their advice got the book translated got it posted and only two days after the full Arabic posting went up Seve the first of what are now countless emails this time from a young man in Jordan who said now that we've got the book in a language we can understand I'm gonna start an underground discussion club based on your ideas and he assured me it's gonna be a very popular club because I'm a very popular guy oh yeah especially with the girls he pointed out and I wrote back to say happy to be of service to your love life my brother clearly this is what the almighty has put me on the earth to do but you know it's the way he ended his email that truly did steal my heart he said I want to work with you for the day when we can turn this underground discussion club into a visible above the ground phenomenon because that is when the Osama bin Laden's of this world will no they don't represent me or my friends well how representative was this young man in May of 2006 I was in Cairo for the first time in my life kept a low profile or so I thought and I was amazed by how many young Muslim men and not just women approached me it must have been the hair to say thank you for posting your book online I'm reading it my friends are reading it and it's now making the rounds in the democracy movement as a matter of fact only about three months ago unexpectedly completely out of the blue I received an email from a New York Times magazine writer doing a story about honor crimes in the Middle East she was asking for an interview but in the course of her pitch to me I guess she said did you know that your book is being downloaded and circulated in Arabic among youth in the underground now I didn't know because I hear from them a lot but I wanted to know how she knew she told me she had spent the last six months in Syria Lebanon and Jordan and she kept running into this circumstance so how representative was this young man from Jordan it turns out quite and we can actually quantify it in just over a year there have been more than 250,000 downloads of the Arabic translation alone and Counting and that intranet strategy of posting the book for free online has actually been so successful that it's convinced me to get the book translated into two other languages in which you can't readily or easily be found in the Muslim world one is ordo for the country of Pakistan where I should point out to you in all honesty the book has been published but the first week that it was carried by booksellers the ulama the theologians issued a fatwa against all of the booksellers carrying a copy of this and so most of them cleared it off their shelves that's why it can't readily be found in Pakistan even though it's published there so it's now translated and posted free of charge in Urdu on my site and the other language of course has to be Farsi or Persian for the country of Iran where you won't be surprised to hear the book is banned outright you might however be surprised to hear that in the very liberal at least by middle-east standards liberal country of the United Arab Emirates my website is banned outright so you know I mean we're talking censorship at various levels here well just to get back to or do and and Farsi in just over six months more than ninety thousand downloads of each so far clearly there is a deep hunger among the emerging generation of Muslims for ideas like this so what do you think literalism is so popular I mean it's not just popular in Islam it's also popular among fundamentalism this country you're right to point out that literalism is on the rise around the world and in various faith traditions and I think at the end of the day there are many reasons for that but at the end of the day a huge reason is globalization and the fact that so many people feel that the you know there's stability and their certainty about life is thrown off kilter so much about their lives is in chaos because of you know economic unknowns and there's some mass migration people literally don't know where their homes are anymore or where their identity is anymore and in that kind of an uncertain environment it's human nature to look for certainty and look for what becomes rigidity religion not necessarily faith but religion easily lends itself to that and so no wonderful example even in Israel you see the ultra-orthodox their influence in you know national politics is very much on the rise so I think globalization is a huge part of it but if you have a different thought about why that is I'd love to know now let me just say one other thing that is not to suggest that you know there are sort of equivalency of literalism in all of the religions as I pointed out in my formal remarks I do believe for reasons that I tried to at least give a hint about and certainly try to back up in my book that Islam today not historically but today suffers from much more literalism which has become mainstream than do the other major faith traditions and those reasons are quite you know not necessarily about globalization but very much again specific to Islam itself which I I encourage you to read it in the book I'm sorry do I want that video to be running in the background probably not for the purposes of the Q&A so thank you for pointing that out my other thanks YouTube given my security situation thank you for coming today and for your courage regarding a HD HOD wonderful is the idea behind it that with that that a Reformation if you will that we've seen in the other major religions as a Christian you know Christianity has a very violent pass right through Reformation we've worked through and is the idea that with its jihad that with discussion and faith-based groups that actually study the Quran and discuss it that that sort of Reformation will come that might bring about a more peaceful I don't know what what is the ultimate goal for you your ideal scenario what would you like to see there I can wonnum line how I would define a Reformation and more importantly by the way a liberal reformation of Islam because I want to say again as a historian it's important to be accurate to the degree that we're capable of being so that Islam has undergone conservative Reformation in its history but when I say conservative what I mean by that is that these Reformation 's have taken the practices of Islam further and further back to the seventh century to the point where we actually have something of a seventh century tribal time-warp that you know we need to pull as Muslims Islam out of and update the practices of the faith for the 21st century the beauty is that Islam as a as a faith very much lends itself to that possibility you know most people don't know this but there are three times as many verses in the Quran calling on us to think and analyze and reflect then verses that tell us what is absolutely right or wrong on that basis alone reinterpretation is more than a possibility in Islam it is we Muslims who must have the courage to you know to to to engage in in the in the practice of reinterpretation and so the bottom line of any Reformation I believe is that all Muslims you know it's but I emphasize especially women since they take the brunt of illiteracy in the Muslim world all Muslims especially women know of their god-given right to think for themselves and finally let me say this much more you mentioned as a preamble to your question you know maybe it's about you know faith-based groups sort of studying the Quran look I don't even think that we need to have such a solitary kind of approach to it i emphasizing in my formal remarks you know this approach of asking questions out loud it sounds deceptively simple but like emphasize the word deceptively because this is exactly what i did with dr. al hindi i just asked him some very basic questions questions that frankly you could have asked him any journalist or or citizen if they had that kind of access and as you say a little bit of courage could have asked him it didn't take a theologian to come up with my questions and yet notice that he crumbled under the weight of those questions my point simply is that asking questions out loud can in fact bust monopolies on interpretation and I'm not interested in dishonouring anybody I'm interested in reminding the self-employed ambassadors of God that they are indeed one self-employed a self-appointed and to that they are only in their view ambassadors of God they are not God you know so let a thousand flowers blue let a thousand interpretations compete with each other for oxygen it's not about eliminating fundamentalism it's about reminding the fundamentalist that theirs are not the only voices that count I don't know how far this is true but it seems like every religion today that is increasing in numbers involves some amount of dogma they employ Dogma to increase the numbers and that's it's a recruiting recruiting tool so to a certain extent it's a self fulfilling thing that if you try to destroy Dogma then it just has a visceral reaction against you well it's a very interesting point you make and the point being for those who may not have heard it at the back you know given how effective a recruiting tool Dogma is if you try to destroy it you're only going to incur a backlash perhaps but I think the key here is the how how do you try to undermine dogma I'm not doing it by leaving Islam declaring myself an atheist which I am NOT in any event and and saying you know Islam is Unruh formal Islam is backward but I want to you know I want to encourage Muslims to reform there are some dissidents in the world of Islam who have done that and I'm a pluralist I defend their right to take whatever peaceful approach they want but that's not effective a much more effective approach as long as it's sincere which in my case it is is in fact to remain within the faith and to emphasize those traditions within the faith that lend themselves to reinterpretation and I'm finding sir that by doing so younger Muslims are feeling a lot more comfortable and a lot more self-assured that they can be at one in the same time faithful and thoughtful and and in that sense yeah we're undermining Dogma but we're doing it in a way that is respectful of the faith itself I have a question about just the connection between the video and getting that video to convey your message okay as we saw the video you had you had edited in certain overlays had that kind of I wouldn't say told us what was going on but maybe set the tone a little bit right and as the video went through the audience response at times was sometimes I guessed like what's going on and sometimes it was chuckling right I think we here in this room laugh cuz we know who that person is and we have no respect for him now if you put this in front of a person that might have some respect for him is chuckling the response you want I mean what is the response you want it because the people you're trying to convince are people who actually might respect him potentially you want a different response from these people not laughing right you know again you've also raised a really interesting point who would be the audience for a video like this and I have to tell you that I'm not so certain that the people who respect the attendees of this world are the audience for something like this because quite frankly I don't think I'm the right messenger for them the real audience for both the message of HD had and of this video are those reform-minded Muslims who exist in droves but who are too afraid to speak publicly and to and to express themselves and their minds openly and what I want to show through this video is just how possible it is to undermine that kind of certainty and that kind of dogma by simply asking questions out loud one of the biggest push backs that I get from young Muslims is that your shed you know maybe because you graduated with honors from University you know you you are self-assured and in spreading this this message but I I don't have the credibility I Who am I I'm not a scholar and I keep hearing that I'm not a scholar I'm not a scholar I'm not a scholar but I point out to them you know that so many of the people who call themselves or who pawn themselves off as scholars and have done so successfully enough to convince these kids that they have authority they too don't have any more education than these do but they've got a whole lot more confidence and you know there are scholarly papers that point out that HD had far from being the Bailiwick of elites has traditionally been the responsibility and right of ordinary Muslims so really we as Muslims I believe need to reclaim that tradition and nobody is saying that anyone's gonna become a jurist or a lawyer or a Mufti or an imam as a result of this we are simply saying that God is the final authority and therefore while we are here on this earth we as human beings and especially as Muslims need to embrace our limited knowledge and that's why we've got a hash it out we've got a debated we've got a you know have dissent rather than again allowing authority of the kind that he has to degenerate into authoritarianism which is the abuse of authority and that's exactly what happens when we anybody muslims or otherwise submit uncritically to the exercise of authority hi so after googling your name about an hour before the presentation I expected to come here and like be offended or like antagonized given the amount of like auntie Irshad Manji stuff on the web but actually I think I agree with almost everything you say that Islam does need movement to reinterpret the verses and to you know under way from the literalism that a lot of the mullahs and the jihad is use but one thing i think i don't i don't know but i want to ask you is one thing i think we'd be careful of is that it is part of the core islamic faith to treat the quran as a direct Word of God right so the challenge is is how do we interpret the Word of God without forgetting a single verse right in a way that we feel makes sense in a modern society or any society right the Quran has to be timeless if it's from God right God presumably right right okay so my question for you in particular is how do you reconcile so I'll Google your name it's it sounded like you support LGBT movements within the Muslim community how do you reconcile that with what's what's what seemingly in the Quran and do you feel that those verses are no don't apply or apply just to your time period or okay I'm gonna I'm gonna answer that generally and then transition to into a more specific answer to your more specific question about gay and lesbian Muslims okay sure the more general sort of question is you know if as Muslims we are to accept the Quran as the Word of God you can't work around that you're sad you've got to work within that so how do you do that in a way that you know still allows for reinterpretation and for me the answer is both simple but not simplistic I mentioned to the woman at the side here that you know the Quran contains three times as many verses asking us to think and reflect and analyze then verses that tell us what is perennial éor timelessly right or wrong that alone suggests that there is plenty of wiggle room plenty of ambiguity within the Quran and indeed if we are going to take it literally as the direct Word of God than just looking at the fact that there are three times as many of those verses the verses about thinking then verses about uncritically swallowing what is in there you know is the basis on which I would suggest there is more than enough room for reinterpretation and so much more room that it might even be a responsibility and not just a right one other thing I'll quickly say about that again most Muslims don't know nevermind non-muslims only about 10% of the Quran is legalities everything else is about the use of one's moral filter and one's ethics so again that puts the onus on us as individuals to use our minds and equally importantly our conscience ISM to derive from the Quran what we believe is right for our lives we're not God I'm not God you're not God I can't impose my you know values on you nor you on me but I can decide for myself what is right for my life and that is the spirit not the not the letter or the or the legal mechanism of HD HOD but the spirit of HD had that I'm talking about now you became just that much more provocative in your question by raising LGBT as and lesbian gay bisexual transgendered Muslims and that no it's good I love it I love it and you were asking you know I mean can you respect what the Quran seemingly I love the fact that you use the word seemingly says about gay and lesbian or about homosexuality can you you know respect what the Quran seemingly says about that and still advocate for the rights so-called of gay and lesbian Muslims and the answer for me is yes and by the way not because well I mean ultimately you're asking about whether in Islam that could even be considered a right to be openly gay or lesbian right okay sure we'll move away from the word rights and just talk about whether it can even exist whether it can even be accepted perhaps is that by Muslims understood understood okay and again you know while the the word seemingly is very important here because much as much like in biblical scholarship in Quranic scholarship there is now an emerging a series of voices saying that those verses that are supposed to oppose homosexuality in fact aren't talking about homosexuality at all they're talking about male-on-male power abuses and rapes and murders in the context of violence not in the context of you know consenting relationships between you know Adil two men or adult women even if you put that aside I have argued on my website which I again invite you to check out that there is plenty of ambiguity within the Quran about even the issue of homosexuality yeah I know the story that suggests that homosexuality is you know is forbidden but there are also plenty of verses in the Quran that promote diversity for example the Quran states that God creates whom he will and that God has not has not made anybody in vain and that everything God creates is excellent now if God is you know the most authoritative if God has unmatched in unparalleled powers why would he make gay and lesbian people as if they were a mistake he knew what he was doing when he made them and some of my Muslim critics say yeah well you know he also made straight people irshad you know and I say yes and that's part of that plan of diversity that the Quran very much supports I'm not saying I'm right and by the way nor am I saying that Muslims must accept homosexuality know who the hell am I to say that I'm not God but I am saying that there is enough wiggle room within the Quran that only on the day of judgement can we know what the truth is and in the meantime you know we've got the opportunities to debate this with each other and that is what the Quran not just allows us but encourages us to do and that's what it's about it's about debate it's not about replacing one certainty with another was it oh and I'll hang out afterwards for one on one five on one so I have actually two comments to make first of all I'm an atheist but I think I could have made a much better argument for this guy's position than he did I think I I don't think he was a worthy opponent for you but nevertheless all right I'll try to find a better one next time I want to see was way to go all right second of all I guess I just like to put in a note of support about your comment you made a one question earlier about the audience of this of this kind of message by sharing an anecdote so at some point I was in Cairo with my Muslim a relatively moderate Muslim father who is he has a PhD from the Imperial College in London so he's by no means you know you know by no means uneducated he happens to live perhaps two miles away from where Najib my fools used to live Nobel laureate Egyptian novelist now deceased very recently actually and was stabbed yes the age of 80 by Muslim fundamentalists who took offense at something that he had written as a work of fiction more than 40 years beforehand right and have stabbed 40 years later in a very allegorical where it could fiction so it was really sort of a slant bass-ackwards interpretation of something that he wrote but nevertheless at some point I was noticing that it was rather sad that precisely what you've mentioned happened and you know saying well you know isn't it nasty that he has to have a police presence outside his house etcetera etcetera excuse I wrote a freaking book come on and my dad said like you know yeah but you know what he's a son of a gun agnostic you know he had it coming and so I guess on some level I think if some of what you say can reach people like him and change his mind in that juncture you've at least gotten part of the way and then you can make a the rest of the way to you know the people who are following the unworthy person that you just spoke to you so in other words you you agree with me that the audience for this video ought to be reform minded Muslims who do not yet have the inner fortitude to speak their minds free exactly we've got to show them that it is possible through very simple question asking robust monopolies of interpretation precisely because if you I mean if you are brought up under the circumstances where you believe that for thinking the wrong thing your your blood is Hallel essentially you are likely to suffer a dearth of imagination of some sort exactly yeah and I think that if that were to change that is the first and most important thing right well thank you for that and I know Michael that was the last question if you would afford me the privilege of having the last question which is simply this I don't want to lose sight of why I came here today which is to seek your input in how to release this video in a way that will make the broadest public impact by which I mean an impact not just on Muslims who of course you know are the key audience but also on non-muslims who want to be able to support reform-minded Muslims but may themselves be scared to do so and scared not a violent but of worrying about you know with it with their own liberal politics that maybe it's none of my business and I shouldn't be involved in this and I don't want to be called a racist for doing so I just want to say to the non-muslims in this audience today that reform-minded Muslims actually do need your support yeah as long as of course it's coming from the you know right intention as we say in Islam the right nyet an intention to support universal human rights because when you recognize the voices of reform-minded Muslims you are automatically sending a signal to the conservative elements in the Muslim world that again they are no longer the only game in town that they are now going to have to compete with other voices that are equally authentic and previous to that they've been able the Conservatives have been able to get away with this argument that they're the pure ones they are the only legitimate voices they're the only ones that represent Islam not even represent Islam well simply represent Islam reform-minded Muslims are increasingly speaking up and we to represent a certain set of interpretations within Islam and when non-muslims recognize this the frame of the story changes and now the Conservatives have no choice but to debate us because they know that according to a huge other group of the world we now exist so please know it is your business to be involved in the liberal Reformation of Muslims thank you all very much

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 25,518

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, islam, history of islam, middle east history, fatwa

Id: ZnL2GtT24Qk

Length: 46min 0sec (2760 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2007