Prior to her talk, I approached her and gave her a copy of my buddy Andrew Bostom’s new book, The Legacy of Jihad and a copy of Bob Spencer’s latest Jihad Watch report on the Danish Mohammed cartoons kerfuffle replete with the original editorial cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten translated into English. I thought she would find both of interest and use. She informed me that she had been interviewed all day by the media about the “cartoons.”
Whatever you can say about her, she is entertaining, has spunk and has great communications skills honed as a Toronto based producer of “Queer TV” a show about the Canadian Gay and lesbian community. A product of Canada’s tolerant PC multicultural society.
Irshad makes no bones about what she is-a lesbian feminist, first and foremost.
I recognize the breed, given that my younger daughter is one-meaning a Jewish lesbian with the same build and energetic qualities of Manji and a pretty effective NGO executive, too, if I may say so.
So, that aspect of Manji resonated with me for sure.
The other aspect of Manji that resonates is her exigesis about the origins of Muslim anti-Semitism, which she says is in the Koran-especially the hateful Sura 9 verses and in what she calls the Pact of Omar-what Bat Yeor and other scholars call “Dhimmitude.” Dhimmitude is the equivalent of Jim Crow laws in Islam for unbelievers and originally in the 8th Century developed by Omar who conquered Palestine and began construction of the Haram for the Al Aksa Mosque bestride the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
How did Manji ever come to terms with her cause?
She relayed anecdotes about her family coming to Vancouver in Western Canada as refugees in 1972 from the regime of the Ugandan monster and dictator, the late Idi Amin, who dispossessed all south Asian merchant families in Uganda.
Manji like most Canadian immigrants who were Muslim went to two schools-the free public school and a Muslim Madrass.
According to Manji, the Imams and Muslim educators at the Madrass in Vancouver taught that Jews were ”treacherous,” into “moolah”-not Allah- in a big way and were only concerned with business. As a child she looked around in diverse Vancouver and saw business signs popping up in bi-lingual English, Cantonese, Hindi and Urdu. She didn’t see any Yiddish or Hebrew bi-lingual signs. When as a 7 year old she relayed that to her Muslim teachers and was, according to her, promptly given the boot. Can’t have inquiring minds at a tender age, can we?
Notwithstanding that defining moment, Manji plunged ahead keeping a nominal Muslim identification. She often wondered, she told the Yale audience, why there was not much in her public school world history texts about Islamic civilization.
Which brings us to the context of the lecture at Yale: Muslim Antisemitism.
She wouldn’t be standing at the podium in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, if she hadn’t screwed up enough courage after 9/11 to write and publish a best-selling book entitled: The Trouble with Islam Today: A Wake Up Call for Honesty and Change . She seized the opportunity, as a fearful and troubled western world was looking for plausible “answers”, and took on the mad blinkered-minded Imams about their intolerance towards her, other “progressive Muslims,” the unbelievers, including her gay and lesbian pals and Jewish and other non-Muslim friends in Canada. The book took off especially when publications like the New York Times gave her notoriety in their profile of her as “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.”
Because of her book promotion activities, as a feminist, nominal Muslim she hit the talk show circuit in Canada and the US and ultimately was given the Chutzpah award in 2004 by the billionaire media Queen of afternoon TV, Oprah.
The Mantra of Itjihad
Manji has been engaged for the past three years in a "jihad" of her own-itjihad the alleged concept of self examination and inquiry that, in her opinion could lead to reform and liberation of the Muslim “umma” the community of Muslim believers.
Irshad’s website Muslim Refusenik bears a flashing verse from the Koran:
“Believers conduct yourself with justice and bear true witness before, even though it be against yourselves, your parents or your kinfolk”
Sura 4:135
This is Manji’s mantra and battle flag. She says as much publicly and in the many interviews she gives. You have to give her credit for being provocative and courageous given that she has more Fatwas and death notices than Carter has liver pills as we used to say when I was a kid. Not funny, as she sits in the same league with British writer Salman Rushdie, both “professing” Muslims, albeit considered heterdox by virtually all Muslim clerics and Imams and Dutch Somali Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom she sincerely called a “friend” during her lecture, but acknowledged that Hirsi was an apostate. More on that later.
The value of Manji is that to an unknowing audience she breathes the fire of tolerance and exorcism of core Muslim anti-Semitism from its origins in kind of a “Hallmarckian” sense. She refers only in passing to the Koranic passages about killing Jews-like the Bani Qurash and the Medina Jews. She belabors the Pact of Omar - with its designation of Christians and Jews with “dog and monkey” patches on cloaks, or “yellow" patches for Jews-which she considers a Muslim export to Christendom and ultimately to those yellow “Jude” stars that the Nazis used to identify Jews going to the gas chambers and ovens of the death camps during the Shoah.
In fairness she does cite later pogroms committed against Jews during “Islam’s golden age” from the 8th to 11th Century, especially in the alleged tolerance of Muslim Al Andaluz in Southern Spain.
Was the "golden Age" of Itjihad tolerant?
Manji is not above committing , what Andrew Bosom, author of The Legacy of Jihad calls a “howler.” One of them is her notion that Spain’s Jewish minority in the 7th Century C.E. “invited” the Muslims from Morroco to Southern Spain to free them from the oppression by the Visigoths. In fact, as Bostom explains it, the Jews were such a disenfranchised powerless minority that nothing of the sort occurred. Rather it was the warring Visigoth factions that gave a tip of the hat to the Muslims across the straits of what later became Gibraltar-itself an Arabic word.
Bostom summarizes the actual historical narrative, thus:
"The Iberian peninsula was conquered in 710-716 C.E. by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a faction of Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavements, deportations and killings. Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, subjugated non-Muslim dhimmis -Jews and Christians- like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – were prohibited from building new churches or synagogues, or restoring the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class exploited by the dominant Arab ruling elites; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing.
Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year (or multiple times within a year as “seasonal” razzias [ghazwa]) raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Many thousands of non-Muslim captives were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves, brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."
"Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews. The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.:
No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [_expression], “Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!” (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace."
" The discriminatory policies of the Berber Muslim Almoravids, who arrived in Spain in 1086, and subsequently those of the even more fanaticized and violent Almohad Berber Muslims (who arrived in Spain in 1146-1147) caused a rapid attrition of the pre-Islamic Iberian Christian (Mozarab) communities, nearly extinguishing them. The Almoravid attitude towards the Mozarabs is well reflected by three successive expulsions of the latter to Morocco: in 1106, 1126, and 1138. The oppressed Mozarabs sent emissaries to the king of Aragon, Alphonso 1st le Batailleur (1104-1134), asking him to come to their rescue and deliver them from the Almoravids. Following the raid that the King of Aragon launched in Andalusia in 1125-1126 in responding to the pleas of Grenada’s Mozarabs, the latter were deported en masse to Morocco in the Fall of 1126."
" The Almohads (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations in Spain and North Africa. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. 148 Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt. Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews:
"..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.."
Manji, holding a copy during her talk at one point for emphasis, had read Yale Professor Maria Rosa Menocal’s book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims , Jews, Chrisitians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain . Manji cited examples of it in her lecture, including references to Maimonides writing in Arabic, but she doesn’t cite Maimonides famous letter indicating why he left Cordoba-the xenophobic Almohods from Morocco were killing Jews on a scale equal to or surpassing the slaughter of my correligionists in the Rhineland during the First Crusade.
Manji considers this “golden age" as one of tolerance -but only if you abiding by the Dhimma or pact that subjugated you. A "golden age" that saw the transfusion of Arabic meter into classical Hebrew poetry and the building of libraries in Damascus and Al Andaluz that allegedly became the conveyor belt to Europe of Aristotelian thought by Ibn Rushd or Averroes and other Muslim scholars.
Problem is that Muslim Spain was a bastion for ”razzias” or massive raids committed on Christian Iberian kingdoms, the Norman coast of France and Charlemagnian Europe under the Abbadid and Alhomod dynasties in search of booty and slaves. Sicily, for example was conquered and ruled by the Kalbid dynasty fror nearly two centuries during the same “golden age.”
Manji cites the closing of the "golden age” as the end of itjihad-introspection and self examination leading to personal development in Islam. It was in her view replaced with the conservative legal rulings of the four principal schools of Islam.
Muslim Intolerance and the alternative of apostasy
It is this closed intolerant mind of Islam that I raised during the Q+A yesterday vis a vis the eruption of outrage of the Muslim “umma” worldwide against western values of free speech expressed in those 12 cartoons released last fall by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and reprinted in several European publications and on the internet this week. I read Manji a comment about her idealized - some would call it fantasized - version of Islam from another courageous woman, Dutch Somali member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
“You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the Koran…You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.”
Manji’s response was “yes,” she was appalled by the intolerance displayed by members of the umma about the Danish editorial cartoons in an interview she gave yesterday to CNN international, but she used that as a "bully pulpit"-you should pardon the expression-plumping for itjihad.
She also made it abundantly clear that Hirsi Ali, who along with friends and colleagues in the anti-jihadist front, Bat Yeor , Ibn Warraq, Bob Spencer and Andrew Bostom and others would be appearing at the annual Pym Fortune Foundation conference at the Hague, in mid February, made a conscious decision to leave Islam and was as she gestured with “quotation marks,” an "apostate".
(Pym Fortune was the self acknowledged gay Dutch Prime Minister candidate assassinated by a Dutchman with Green Party and Islamic “sympathies”).
Manji clearly was sending a message that she was trying valiantly, perhaps foolishly in light of the Fatwas issued against her, to retain her identity as a Muslim, as a living example that you can have your “cake and eat it too” and live in the sweet dream of western tolerance.
She told an anecdote about a visit to the Haram in Jerusalem and was confronted by the leader of the Waqf-the Muslim religious body that the State of Israel allows to run the Al Aksa Mosque complex on the Temple Mount. The leader demanded that in accordance with the “Pact of Omar” that she wear a girdle over her dress-a mark that she is a Dhimmi-a subjugated one. That apparently led to a row. She said that when she raised the “Pact of Omar"-the Dhimma, with Muslims, they begged off any recognition of it blithely saying that Jews and Others were “tolerated.” Manji told us that she took a picture of the purported "Pact of Omar", while she visited the Al Aksa mosque, where it is apparently enshrined.
Manji generously gave of her time in answering a whole bevy of questions by members of the audience. Some insightful and some not.
My younger friend, Yale senior and Yale Daily News commentator, Jamie Kirchick who was sitting next to me during Manji’s presentation noted that a few possible Muslims in the audience left with scowls on their face indicative of their displeasure with what Manji was espousing.
I really hope that Manji would crack open the copy I gave her of Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad, and find in the Yale COOP bookstore Bat Ye’or's recent work, Eurabia. But she might start with Bob Spencer’s New York Times best seller The Politically Correct guide to Islam . At least if she could bone up on the factual basis for why people like her friend Hirsi Ali and my friend Ibn Warraq elected to reject Islam and became apostates and write and talk about it, then she might realize that she is not an “Islam of One." Rather she might realize that she is an apostate like many former Muslims who reject Islam’s consignment to perdition of all unbelievers, including Jews like me and westernized tolerant "progressive" Muslims like her.
An Islam of One: Irshad Manji at Yale
By Jerry Gordon, former US military intelligence office and Middle East analyst at American Congress for Truth
There she was on the stage at the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium at Yale, escorted by uniformed security personnel, to speak at a seminar program of The Institute on Global Anti-Semitism Policy: Irshad Manji, expressive Canadian lesbian, feminist and nominal Muslim. She was a send up on that US Army ad to recruit soldiers, a literal “Islam of one.” Unique. Manji loves Jews and all unbelievers and thinks that Islam can be reformed from the inside out. A breathtaking and daunting prospect.
Manji is a visiting fellow at Yale this year busily writing a new book, as she told the audience in the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium.
This was her first public talk at Yale.
Prior to her talk, I approached her and gave her a copy of my buddy Andrew Bostom’s new book, The Legacy of Jihad and a copy of Bob Spencer’s latest Jihad Watch report on the Danish Mohammed cartoons kerfuffle replete with the original editorial cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten translated into English. I thought she would find both of interest and use. She informed me that she had been interviewed all day by the media about the “cartoons.”
Whatever you can say about her, she is entertaining, has spunk and has great communications skills honed as a Toronto based producer of “Queer TV” a show about the Canadian Gay and lesbian community. A product of Canada’s tolerant PC multicultural society.
Irshad makes no bones about what she is-a lesbian feminist, first and foremost.
I recognize the breed, given that my younger daughter is one-meaning a Jewish lesbian with the same build and energetic qualities of Manji and a pretty effective NGO executive, too, if I may say so.
So, that aspect of Manji resonated with me for sure.
The other aspect of Manji that resonates is her exigesis about the origins of Muslim anti-Semitism, which she says is in the Koran-especially the hateful Sura 9 verses and in what she calls the Pact of Omar-what Bat Yeor and other scholars call “Dhimmitude.” Dhimmitude is the equivalent of Jim Crow laws in Islam for unbelievers and originally in the 8th Century developed by Omar who conquered Palestine and began construction of the Haram for the Al Aksa Mosque bestride the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
How did Manji ever come to terms with her cause?
She relayed anecdotes about her family coming to Vancouver in Western Canada as refugees in 1972 from the regime of the Ugandan monster and dictator, the late Idi Amin, who dispossessed all south Asian merchant families in Uganda.
Manji like most Canadian immigrants who were Muslim went to two schools-the free public school and a Muslim Madrass.
According to Manji, the Imams and Muslim educators at the Madrass in Vancouver taught that Jews were ”treacherous,” into “moolah”-not Allah- in a big way and were only concerned with business. As a child she looked around in diverse Vancouver and saw business signs popping up in bi-lingual English, Cantonese, Hindi and Urdu. She didn’t see any Yiddish or Hebrew bi-lingual signs. When as a 7 year old she relayed that to her Muslim teachers and was, according to her, promptly given the boot. Can’t have inquiring minds at a tender age, can we?
Notwithstanding that defining moment, Manji plunged ahead keeping a nominal Muslim identification. She often wondered, she told the Yale audience, why there was not much in her public school world history texts about Islamic civilization.
Which brings us to the context of the lecture at Yale: Muslim Antisemitism.
She wouldn’t be standing at the podium in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, if she hadn’t screwed up enough courage after 9/11 to write and publish a best-selling book entitled: The Trouble with Islam Today: A Wake Up Call for Honesty and Change . She seized the opportunity, as a fearful and troubled western world was looking for plausible “answers”, and took on the mad blinkered-minded Imams about their intolerance towards her, other “progressive Muslims,” the unbelievers, including her gay and lesbian pals and Jewish and other non-Muslim friends in Canada. The book took off especially when publications like the New York Times gave her notoriety in their profile of her as “Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare.”
Because of her book promotion activities, as a feminist, nominal Muslim she hit the talk show circuit in Canada and the US and ultimately was given the Chutzpah award in 2004 by the billionaire media Queen of afternoon TV, Oprah.
The Mantra of Itjihad
Manji has been engaged for the past three years in a "jihad" of her own-itjihad the alleged concept of self examination and inquiry that, in her opinion could lead to reform and liberation of the Muslim “umma” the community of Muslim believers.
Irshad’s website Muslim Refusenik bears a flashing verse from the Koran:
“Believers conduct yourself with justice and bear true witness before, even though it be against yourselves, your parents or your kinfolk”
Sura 4:135
This is Manji’s mantra and battle flag. She says as much publicly and in the many interviews she gives. You have to give her credit for being provocative and courageous given that she has more Fatwas and death notices than Carter has liver pills as we used to say when I was a kid. Not funny, as she sits in the same league with British writer Salman Rushdie, both “professing” Muslims, albeit considered heterdox by virtually all Muslim clerics and Imams and Dutch Somali Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom she sincerely called a “friend” during her lecture, but acknowledged that Hirsi was an apostate. More on that later.
The value of Manji is that to an unknowing audience she breathes the fire of tolerance and exorcism of core Muslim anti-Semitism from its origins in kind of a “Hallmarckian” sense. She refers only in passing to the Koranic passages about killing Jews-like the Bani Qurash and the Medina Jews. She belabors the Pact of Omar - with its designation of Christians and Jews with “dog and monkey” patches on cloaks, or “yellow" patches for Jews-which she considers a Muslim export to Christendom and ultimately to those yellow “Jude” stars that the Nazis used to identify Jews going to the gas chambers and ovens of the death camps during the Shoah.
In fairness she does cite later pogroms committed against Jews during “Islam’s golden age” from the 8th to 11th Century, especially in the alleged tolerance of Muslim Al Andaluz in Southern Spain.
Was the "golden Age" of Itjihad tolerant?
Manji is not above committing , what Andrew Bosom, author of The Legacy of Jihad calls a “howler.” One of them is her notion that Spain’s Jewish minority in the 7th Century C.E. “invited” the Muslims from Morroco to Southern Spain to free them from the oppression by the Visigoths. In fact, as Bostom explains it, the Jews were such a disenfranchised powerless minority that nothing of the sort occurred. Rather it was the warring Visigoth factions that gave a tip of the hat to the Muslims across the straits of what later became Gibraltar-itself an Arabic word.
Bostom summarizes the actual historical narrative, thus:
"The Iberian peninsula was conquered in 710-716 C.E. by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a faction of Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavements, deportations and killings. Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, subjugated non-Muslim dhimmis -Jews and Christians- like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – were prohibited from building new churches or synagogues, or restoring the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class exploited by the dominant Arab ruling elites; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing.
Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year (or multiple times within a year as “seasonal” razzias [ghazwa]) raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Many thousands of non-Muslim captives were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves, brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women."
"Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews. The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.:
No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [_expression], “Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!” (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace."
" The discriminatory policies of the Berber Muslim Almoravids, who arrived in Spain in 1086, and subsequently those of the even more fanaticized and violent Almohad Berber Muslims (who arrived in Spain in 1146-1147) caused a rapid attrition of the pre-Islamic Iberian Christian (Mozarab) communities, nearly extinguishing them. The Almoravid attitude towards the Mozarabs is well reflected by three successive expulsions of the latter to Morocco: in 1106, 1126, and 1138. The oppressed Mozarabs sent emissaries to the king of Aragon, Alphonso 1st le Batailleur (1104-1134), asking him to come to their rescue and deliver them from the Almoravids. Following the raid that the King of Aragon launched in Andalusia in 1125-1126 in responding to the pleas of Grenada’s Mozarabs, the latter were deported en masse to Morocco in the Fall of 1126."
" The Almohads (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations in Spain and North Africa. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. 148 Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt. Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews:
"..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.."
Manji, holding a copy during her talk at one point for emphasis, had read Yale Professor Maria Rosa Menocal’s book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims , Jews, Chrisitians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain . Manji cited examples of it in her lecture, including references to Maimonides writing in Arabic, but she doesn’t cite Maimonides famous letter indicating why he left Cordoba-the xenophobic Almohods from Morocco were killing Jews on a scale equal to or surpassing the slaughter of my correligionists in the Rhineland during the First Crusade.
Manji considers this “golden age" as one of tolerance -but only if you abiding by the Dhimma or pact that subjugated you. A "golden age" that saw the transfusion of Arabic meter into classical Hebrew poetry and the building of libraries in Damascus and Al Andaluz that allegedly became the conveyor belt to Europe of Aristotelian thought by Ibn Rushd or Averroes and other Muslim scholars.
Problem is that Muslim Spain was a bastion for ”razzias” or massive raids committed on Christian Iberian kingdoms, the Norman coast of France and Charlemagnian Europe under the Abbadid and Alhomod dynasties in search of booty and slaves. Sicily, for example was conquered and ruled by the Kalbid dynasty fror nearly two centuries during the same “golden age.”
Manji cites the closing of the "golden age” as the end of itjihad-introspection and self examination leading to personal development in Islam. It was in her view replaced with the conservative legal rulings of the four principal schools of Islam.
Muslim Intolerance and the alternative of apostasy
It is this closed intolerant mind of Islam that I raised during the Q+A yesterday vis a vis the eruption of outrage of the Muslim “umma” worldwide against western values of free speech expressed in those 12 cartoons released last fall by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and reprinted in several European publications and on the internet this week. I read Manji a comment about her idealized - some would call it fantasized - version of Islam from another courageous woman, Dutch Somali member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
“You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the Koran…You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.”
Manji’s response was “yes,” she was appalled by the intolerance displayed by members of the umma about the Danish editorial cartoons in an interview she gave yesterday to CNN international, but she used that as a "bully pulpit"-you should pardon the expression-plumping for itjihad.
She also made it abundantly clear that Hirsi Ali, who along with friends and colleagues in the anti-jihadist front, Bat Yeor , Ibn Warraq, Bob Spencer and Andrew Bostom and others would be appearing at the annual Pym Fortune Foundation conference at the Hague, in mid February, made a conscious decision to leave Islam and was as she gestured with “quotation marks,” an "apostate".
(Pym Fortune was the self acknowledged gay Dutch Prime Minister candidate assassinated by a Dutchman with Green Party and Islamic “sympathies”).
Manji clearly was sending a message that she was trying valiantly, perhaps foolishly in light of the Fatwas issued against her, to retain her identity as a Muslim, as a living example that you can have your “cake and eat it too” and live in the sweet dream of western tolerance.
She told an anecdote about a visit to the Haram in Jerusalem and was confronted by the leader of the Waqf-the Muslim religious body that the State of Israel allows to run the Al Aksa Mosque complex on the Temple Mount. The leader demanded that in accordance with the “Pact of Omar” that she wear a girdle over her dress-a mark that she is a Dhimmi-a subjugated one. That apparently led to a row. She said that when she raised the “Pact of Omar"-the Dhimma, with Muslims, they begged off any recognition of it blithely saying that Jews and Others were “tolerated.” Manji told us that she took a picture of the purported "Pact of Omar", while she visited the Al Aksa mosque, where it is apparently enshrined.
Manji generously gave of her time in answering a whole bevy of questions by members of the audience. Some insightful and some not.
My younger friend, Yale senior and Yale Daily News commentator, Jamie Kirchick who was sitting next to me during Manji’s presentation noted that a few possible Muslims in the audience left with scowls on their face indicative of their displeasure with what Manji was espousing.
I really hope that Manji would crack open the copy I gave her of Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad, and find in the Yale COOP bookstore Bat Ye’or's recent work, Eurabia. But she might start with Bob Spencer’s New York Times best seller The Politically Correct guide to Islam . At least if she could bone up on the factual basis for why people like her friend Hirsi Ali and my friend Ibn Warraq elected to reject Islam and became apostates and write and talk about it, then she might realize that she is not an “Islam of One." Rather she might realize that she is an apostate like many former Muslims who reject Islam’s consignment to perdition of all unbelievers, including Jews like me and westernized tolerant "progressive" Muslims like her.
Posted by Jerry Gordon at February 3, 2006 11:15 AM