Manji: Allah made gays and lesbians, too

INTERVIEW Unapologetic for her defence of the gay and lesbian lifestyle, controversial liberal-Islam author Irshad Manji has challenged critics to explain how Allah in all His glory could have made “misfits or abominations”.                

“Again, (going) back to the Quran, everybody is a deliberate act of creation on God's part. So even gays and lesbians have been created by God,” the Uganda-born Canadian said in an exclusive interview last week.

“For those who say that they are somehow misfits or abominations, what they are really therefore saying is that ‘Allah made mistakes’.”

Manji challenged critics to reconcile the notion that ‘Allah has made mistakes’ with the widely accepted view that Allah is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful).

“So reconcile that one for me, guys,” challenged Manji.

She also defended her advocacy of another controversial subject - interfaith marriages - as being her way of rescuing young Muslims from deserting the faith. Otherwise, they would be forced to choose between the faith and the love of their life.

This is an area she believes that the mainstream Islamic clergy are neglecting, as they focus on banalities like ‘Is it okay to pray near the graves of relatives?’.

The more realistic question that young Muslims are asking, Manji said, is: ‘I have fallen in love with a non-Muslim, and my parents and their imam insist that Islam forbids me from marrying outside the faith. Is this true? Do I really need to give up the love of my life in order to retain my faith?’

As is her approach to all things religious, she said that once again ijtihad, or independent thinking, is where the answer lies.

She related how she had asked an imam to exercise ijtihad and to re-interpret the verses of the Quran that have traditionally been used to stop interfaith marriages.

“Well I am happy to tell you, not only did he do that, but he actually came up with a blessing, a blessing of interfaith marriages from the perspective of the Quran.”

The blessing, which she posted on her website, became so popular that she had to translate it into 20 languages, including Malay, in just six months, Manji claimed.

“So, obviously, there is a deep thirst for these ideas among the new generation.”        

She posits that if her way of doing things can stop young Muslims from walking away from Islam, by realising that they can be faithful and thoughtful at the same time, she has no reason to apologise.

“Maybe I’ll apologise to God on the day of judgment. And if God is love, then at the very least he will give me a fair hearing,” said the author who is of Gujerati and Egyptian descent.

Asked to comment on her controversial stand on the Palestine-Israeli crisis, Manji explained that her concern is of reconciliation of the parties involved, as opposed to the common practice of blaming or supporting one party or the other.

She has been accused of being pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian by many who do not agree with her stand on the matter.

Denying that she is a “lackey” of Israel, Manji said that unlike most anti-Israeli activists, she had actually spent time in the Middle Eastern state and talked to both Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied zones.

While agreeing that some of the restrictions placed on Palestinians do impact their humanity negatively, she added that she could not deny the humanity of many of the Israelis either.

“One doesn’t have to be either-or. If you are truly interested in what it is to be human, you need to reconcile the either-or,” Manji argued.

Reconciliation, she claimed, is the proper way as the Quran tells that all of mankind, even Israelis, are “children of God”, and while we disagree with one another, we do not have to deny one another's humanity.

She admitted though that the experience of her family being evicted by Ugandan military dictator and fellow Muslim Idi Amin in 1972 taught her that “if you call yourself a victim, you can easily become an oppressor at the same time”.

She related how the very legitimate idea of liberation from Western imperialism, for example, was skewed by dictators like Amin into a new kind of oppression of “Africa for the blacks”.

The theme of being wary of the possibility of victims turning into oppressors, Manji said, ran through her work pretty much all her life and helped to define who she now is.

Ironically, it was Western inaction over the depredation of the German Nazis against the Jews that Israel continues to use as a moral bulwark for its actions to secure the “security” of territories seized from Palestine.
                   
This may be yet another victim-turns-oppressor story as the West stands silent over Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, who are already using this to justify a guerilla war that targets not only Israeli military assets, but civilian targets as well.

VIDEO | 6.07 mins


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