Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji are two of the most prominent and outspoken critics of what they and others see as “mainstream Islam.” Brilliant, dynamic women, they have each rebelled against a Muslim upbringing to become public figures with large and devoted followings. Both are successful authors: Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, Infidel, was a New York Times best seller; Manji’s combination memoir-polemic, The Trouble With Islam Today, has been published in almost 30 countries. They are unyielding in their support for the West, feminism, reason, freedom—and have both have been targets of death threats and have required protection.Yet though they are allies on one level, their approaches to Islam are strikingly different, with one working outside the religion and one within. Neither is a spokeswoman for a significant Muslim constituency in the Middle East. But their differences have implications for all the big issues the West grapples with in considering the Muslim world. Hirsi Ali is an avowed atheist whose criticisms can be seen as attacks not only on radical Islamism but on the religion of Islam. About the 9/11 attacks, she declared: “This is Islam,” and “not just Islam, this was the core of Islam.” The attacks forced her to decide “which side was I on?” Her book, Infidel, is the story of how she chose the West.Manji is a practicing Muslim who seeks to change her faith from within. As founder and director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, she assists other maverick writers and scholars who dissent within their communities. “What I want,” Manji has said, “is an Islamic Reformation”. In contrast to Ali, she adds, there is “no need to choose between Islam and the West.”Both Ali and Manji come from non-Arab Muslim backgrounds—maybe one reason for their opposition to Islamic orthodoxy, which they see as Arab-dominated. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Somalia, and lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya before fleeing to the Netherlands at 22 to avoid an arranged marriage. Manji was born in 1968 in Uganda, but her family, part Egyptian and part Indian, moved to Canada when she was 4 to escape Idi Amin. She too draws a distinction between Islam and Arab tribal culture, its “dictatorship from the desert…We’re not in the Saudi sand dunes anymore.” Manji has a broader and more flexible idea than Ali of what Islam is and can be. While Ali says, “Saudi Arabia is the source of Islam and its quintessence”, Manji is convinced that her religion can escape Arab domination. The writer Paul Berman suggests that the difference between them may be because Manji was raised in the warm, liberal, welcoming precincts of British Columbia, where pluralism was a fact of life. Hirsi Ali’s early years, by contrast, consisted of dictatorship, war, patriarchy, genital cutting, confinement and beatings so severe she once ended up in a hospital with a fractured skull. “The most important explanation for the mental and material backlog we Muslims find ourselves in,” Hirsi Ali has said, “should probably be sought in the sexual morality that we were force-fed from birth.” In the Netherlands, she devoted herself to helping Muslim women “develop the vocabulary of resistance” and she continues the fight from the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where she is a resident fellow. Manji, says, “Empowering women is the way to awaken the Muslim world.” But she is not only a committed feminist (bad enough in the eyes of Muslim conservatives), she’s also an open lesbian. The two women have known each other for four years, since Hirsi Ali interviewed Manji for a Dutch newspaper. They immediately bonded. “I could not believe she was not an atheist,” Hirsi Ali says, “and she could not believe that I had become one.” When Time magazine named Hirsi Ali one of its “100 most influential people” for 2005, it was Manji who wrote the comment on her. Manji admires Hirsi Ali’s determination to speak out , saying that “Ayaan’s defiant distrust of Muslim authorities can help generate debates that move us closer to honesty.”Hirsi Ali says, “Irshad is the most admirable person I know who is trying to achieve change from within” Manji says her own position “is that Muslims can reform… It’s we Muslims who must develop the courage to change.”Hirsi Ali replies, “I make a distinction between Islam and Muslims.” That is, “I picture the defeat of Islam as large swaths of Muslims crossing the line and accepting the value system of secular humanism.’’
