Rating: 
Summary: Dr. Laura says!
Review: Manji's charge that the Qur'an has been changed is another fine example of her poor research. The Oxford History of Islam as well as Encyclopedia Britanica and other reputable publications clearly state that the Qur'an has been prefectly preserved since the time its original revelation to Prophet Muhammad. Dr. Laura Vaglieri, author of An Apology to Islam, wrote, "On the whole we find it Qur'an a collection of wisdom which can be adapted by the most intelligent of men, the greatest philosophers, and the most skillful politicians...But there is another proof of divinity of the Qur'an: it is the fact that it has been preserved intact through the ages since the time of its revelation till the present day...it was, therefore, neither by means of violence of arms, nor through the pressure of obtrusive missionaries, that caused the rapid diffusion of Islam, but, above all through the fact that this book, presented to the vanquished with the liberty to accept it or rejected, was the book of God."
Rating:
Summary: Full of Mistakes
Review: This book lacks accuracy but it is also full of mistakes. On page 44 she states that Muhammad preached for "25 years or so." All books of history tells us that Muhammad received his first revelation from Angle Gabriel at age 40 and passed away at age 63. That's 23 years. She has many other mistakes too; however, I prefer to give some facts about the life of Muhammad she should have included: Muhammad was born in Arabia in 570 years after Christ. He was the descendant of Abraham and Ishmael. He was orphaned as a child and grew up poor. By the age 25 he came to be known for his honesty and good character. People called him Al-Ameen meaning trustworthy and truthful. At the age of 25 a wealthy widow impressed by his honesty and good character proposed marriage to him. Although she was 40 he accepted her proposal, and they lived for the next 15 years a comfortable and blissful marriage. Until the age of 40 Muhammad had lived as a good citizen--a quiet uneventful life. One night while he was meditating in a cave Angel Gabriel appears to him and asks him to, "Read in the Name of Your Lord." Muhammad was illiterate so he said I can't read. But eventually he repeated the words after Gabriel. This began 23 years of revelation that we know now as the Qur'an. When he proclaimed the message people laughed at him. They wondered why God has chosen him instead of much wealthier more intelligent and powerful leaders of Mecca. But God chooses whomever he wills! They attacked him and early Muslims physically and verbally. At one point due to severity of persecution, a group of Muslims that migrated from Arabia to a nearby country, Ethiopia, rules by a just Christian king. At his court facing extradition to Mecca, they explained to the Christian King why they had left the religion of their forefathers in the following manner: "O King!! we were plunged in the depth of ignorance and barbarism; we adored idols, we lived in unchastity, we ate the dead bodies, and we spoke abominations, we disregarded every feeling of humanity, and the duties of hospitality and neighborhood were neglected; we knew no law but that of the strong, when God raised among us a man, of whose birth, truthfulness, honesty, and purity we were aware; and he called to the Oneness of God, and taught us not to associate anything with Him. He forbade us the worship of idols; and he enjoined us to speak the truth, to be faithful to our trusts, to be merciful and to regard the rights of the neighbors and kith and kin; he forbade us to speak evil of women, or to eat the substance of orphans; he ordered us to fly from the vices, and to abstain from evil; to offer prayers, to render alms, and to observe fast. We have believed in him, we have accepted his teachings and his injunctions to worship God, and not to associate anything with Him, and we have allowed what He has allowed, and prohibited what He has prohibited. For this reason, our people have risen against us, have persecuted us in order to make us forsake the worship of God and return to the worship of idols and other abominations. They have tortured and injured us, until finding no safety among them, we have come to your country, and hope you will protect us from oppression." The above summarizes the effect of Muhammad and his message on humanity. In this regard renowned British Historian Arnold Toynbee remarked in his Civilization on Trial, "The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue...This Islamic spirit (of submission to divine guidance) maybe expected to manifest itself in many practical ways, and one of these manifestations might be liberation from alcohol, which was inspired by religious conviction and which was therefore able to accomplish what could never be enforced by the external sanction of an alien law...Here then in the foreground of the future we can remark two valuable influences which Islam may exert upon the cosmopolitan proletariat of the Western society..." Many historians have attested to this fact and consider his accomplishment nothing short of a miracle. Yet as he said through out his mission he was only a man conveying God's message. Historian Michael Hart wrote in his book The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, "My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular levels." French Poet Lamartine wrote in Histoire de La Turquie, "Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a religion without images, the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, which is Muhammad. If Greatness of purpose, smallness of means and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in modern history with Muhammad?" I think you get the idea that Muhammad was more than a reformer or philosopher. He brought about real change, real peace, all in the name of God, never taking credit, live a humble simple life and died with no possessions. Thus, I believe a serious study of his life and accomplishments are something to consider, especially his claim of receiving a message from God. Please visit http://www.islam101.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Brave expose on the CANCER of ISLAM
Review: Despite the single * campaign to malign Irshad Manji by a select few reviewers, this book is a highly readable, courageous attempt by a moslem woman to confront the evil that is Islam. 99.9 % of the muslims, even the most reasonable and educated ones, feel dutybound to defend Islam whenever it is questioned. Add to that the "Politically Correct" non muslim apologisers for Islam in the west and India and elsewhere; and you have a perfect recipe to make sure that the "abhorrent Islamic Core Beliefs" will never be debated much less reformed. Every religion has been misused by its followers but Islam's unique genius is that the "most brutal and violent acts have been condoned in the Koran and exemplified by Mohammed's life, along with many other islamic principles, to ensure a continued military and imperialistic success of Islam in the past 1400 years and in centuries to come." If you
study history, you will see the genius in the organization of Islam as a conquoring ideology - much like the unstoppable cancer or ever mutating virus. Victims of Islamic conquest and
forced conversions were pagan Arabia, zoroastrian Babylon, coptic Egypt, Eastern orthodox Byzantium (now Turkey), Buddhist central Asia, afghanistan and more recently Hindu Pakistan-India, Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria etc etc etc. One central feature of Islam is "Once you are a muslim, you can never leave Islam - or you deserve to be killed." and "Once a nation is conquored by Islam" it can never leave the fold. This has always been true in 1400 years with one durable exception - Spain. And Medieval Spain had to adopt EVIL tactics themselves to fight the EVIL of ISLAM. That was (and sadly is) the only way to fight the scourge of Islam. Short of this type of brutal oppsition, Islamic Cancer will continue to spread as seen in the last 100 years in Pakistan, Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Sudan and slowly creeping up in France, UK and other western countries. Canada just instituted a Sharia court at its Muslim citizens' request (I too am shocked) and Detroit city council just passed a law that allows Muezzins to call for prayers 5 times a day on loudspeakers. All this we do in the name "Freedom of Religion" while Islam is programmed not to yield an inch. I wouldn't be surprised if this cancer continues to spread and in 200-400 years we have a Islamic Republic of Europe or Islamic Republic of America. The other central feature in Islam is the absolute unquestionability of a single word in the Koran. It is as if you are questioning God and "MUST" be killed for doing so. That is why Irshad Manji stands out as absolutely courageous in her bold questioning of Islam. Sadly there are so very few like her in Islam while it is not hard to find the apologisers for Islam as in many of the single * reviewers who feel it is their Islamic duty to denigrate anyone who questions Islam.
Rating:
Summary: Ms. Manji, Your 15 minutes of fame is over
Review: I found about Ms. Manji and her inaccurate and misguided book through Tom Friedman's article. I went to her website and downloaded the Urdu version of her book. I wanted to buy the english version but after reading the first few pages in the Urdu translation, I changed my mind.
To be a muslim means "to submit". If one finds it difficult to submit to a religion with a set of morals and rules then pursue other choices, don't blame the religion. For instance, the Quran is clearly against homosexuality. Now what part of NO does Ms. Manji do not understand. What is there to debate!
Ms. Manji, your 15 minutes of fame are over.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful book for bigots and islamophobes
Review: As a muslim living in the west, i find this book a complete disgrace. The author is completely ignorant of her faith, she asserts things about islam which exist only in her distorted mind and the mind of the ignorant bigots who agree with her. She makes false claims about the koran and islam which will certainly give comfort to the islamphobes and the fundamentalist evangelist christians, many of them have been lavishing her book here with 'stars'.
If anyone is sincerely interested to read about a woman's perspective of islam from inside then my advice is to read any books by Fatima Mernissi, a well known woman Muslim scholar with real knowledge of the subject or read the book by Leila Ahmed's 'women and gender in islam'.
Rating:
Summary: A "letter" from a Muslim to the Muslim community
Review: As an American, I find this book illuminating about the benefits of our own society, and an impressive effort by a Muslim to shake up the Muslim community at large. The author writes with the fury of a mother protecting her family - which, as we should know, might (and in this case does) include a rather bracing and clear reprimand. I do wonder whether someone totally new to Islam and the Middle East would be able to use the book as one's sole introduction; the book was meant for Muslim readers after all (e.g. the author's web site offers on-line translations of the book in Arabic and Urdu).
Apparently not a few Muslim readers will find the criticisms a bit much to deal with; to them I would plead, you are better off having your mind stretched, even if it hurts; too much mental comfort leads to mental incapacity. From Khalil Gibran's The Prophet: "Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding..."
I will add that America needs its own Irshad Manji. Since we are human we have our own faults, some of them deep; I believe many of us need a breaking of our own shell of complacent ignorance of the world at large.
Rating: 
Summary: Following in God's Footsteps, With a Push from Extreemists
Review: I think it's terrific that Ms. Manji is trying to encourage a practical and humanistic dialog with her fellow Muslims. I want to encourage her to keep writing and speaking. There are people out there with a lot of money funding suicidal extremists, and one can only hope that Ms. Manji's work will help stifle that trend.
If one searches for the reasons for and meaning of Extremist Islam today, one inevitably needs to understand who is funding extremism, why they are doing so, and how they are increasingly successful. Is it purely deranged and rich ideologues? Is this primarily a problem in poor countries? But such questions are not the focus of this book, which takes a simpler and higher plane to promote enlightened humanism among Muslims today.
However, when viewed in such idealistic terms, the challenge of reconciling Humanism with Religion goes far beyond Islam. As other reviewer's here have noted, the problem is that almost all of today's religions are founded and structured around gods that, when aroused to anger (which is often) go on to terrorize and punish their impudent "children" with horrible acts of inhumanity and intolerance--in other words--they act Extreme. However, because these horrible acts are done by God, the very categorization of these acts as "horrible" and "inhuman" loses its meaning. If God does it, it's good, not horrible; it's not about human flesh, but about the spirit of God.
Furthermore, each religion has central concepts of "Chosen", "Anointed" or "Blessed" people vs. the "Blasphemous", "Non-Believers" and "Infidels". In other words, these religions are inherently divisive around ideology.
So, while the major religions all include exhortation to be kind to strangers and have lots of examples of brotherly love, they do so along the narrow, absolute lines draw by God that are never to be crossed.
When God commands Abraham to slit the throat of his own son to prove his loyalty, or when God massacres thousands of people because he doesn't think they respect him enough, is that a role model or a parable to live by? How did God handle the Golden Calf experiment after his most Chosen wandered delusionally around the desert for 40 years? Is it the case of him simply dispensing with their troublesome flesh and bringing their soles back home for some needed discipline and caring? So this isn't being inhumane, just spiritually caring?
How do you reconcile, then, the desire to be inclusive, pluralistic and tolerant, when each religion's foundation sees doing so as wrong? Where is the dividing line between piously emulating God and being an extremist? When is one acting spiritually vs. monstrously? And while you are at it, what is "Good" and what is "Evil"? What it all comes down to is literalization vs. interpretation.
The people that take the teachings literally are viewed as "Extremists" by those who believe that the teachings should be viewed as flexible parables that can and should be interpreted by each generation depending on their circumstance. In contrast, the "Extremists" believe that the "Contexualizers" are merely making excuses to wiggle out of the discomfort of conforming to God's explicit wishes and behavior modelling. Given the explicit harshness of these ancient teachings, who is right?
People, like Ms. Maji, who want to reconcile religion with humanism try to dilute the harshness of the explicit teachings and modernize them, but their selective dilution can easily be viewed as inherently trivializing the teachings. After all, when a God (or a parent or teacher, for that matter) instructs a child explicitly to do or not do something, is it always OK for the child to get creatively interpretative? Who is to say which child's interpretative logic is correct? These religions' gods do not explicitly say anywhere "Don't take everything I say literally, just interpret what I say to suit yourselves when you want or need to..just use your own judgement"? They are just explicit and often extremely so, often using elegant prose to retell that God was extremely demanding, angry, inflexible and harsh.
If the New Testament, Koran or Torah had in it such humanistic magnificence as God saying something like "I don't care what loving names you call me, who claims to be my favorite, or what cute pictures you draw of me, but for MY sake, just behave nicely towards each other and stop fighting!", then it would be easy to reconcile religion with humanistic thought and behavior. But, at the core, that is not what is written, and that is not what feeds the souls eager to emulate God's Ways as he explicitly expressed them.
As the Inquisition and Crusades have shown the world, this contradiction between humanism and religious ideology is not just a problem for Muslims grappling with extremism. It seems to me, in fact, that the period of Islamic Enlightenment where people did not kill each other all the time in the name of religion, and actually got a long, much like the Christian Enlightenment today in the Western World, is rare anomaly. It can go either way, and usually goes the way of extremists, especially when given physical deprivations and a good push.
Therefore, I think Ms. Manji's book would be better titled and thought through as "The Challenge of Humanising Religion", but that has already been written about. It just needs to be updated with the latest acts or cruelty perpetuated in the name of God. This doesn't mean giving up hope. It just means that until we flip the situation to where Humanism is the foundation of our belief system with some enlightened spirituality on top it, we will be living in a dysfunctional world where the Maslow Hierarchy is inverted, and kindness and open-mindedness will be subject to parochial interpretation.
Rating: 
Summary: Hello??
Review: I sympathise with the writer's problems with Islam. However, the essential issue is her inability to recognize the core problem with Islam. It is a religion, like all religions, based on historical fallacies, logical absurdities (The Koran being dictated to Mohammed by G(sic)od, for instance), and a refusal to question the basic assertions of its grounding. I suggest that her psychological scizophrenia would be cured by leaving superstition and embracing a Humanism which would eliminate her troubling cognitive dissonance.
Rating:
Summary: a sleeper, a must read
Review: i do not want to waste any one's time by reading just another=mine review...just read the book & decide for yourself..figuratively speaking Ishad Manji ( and i am sure it was a much more painful job than admitted in print )pulls out the weeds of her backyard...you will admire her courageous thoughts & her writing style
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Summary: Like Father, like Daughter
Review: I doubt that the pathological upbringing of Irshad was the cause for her mental and behavioral deviance. From my own experience, genetics is a major culprit. One of my past fellows was a son of a priest who abused him in every way. The father ended up in a mental institution, while the son lived similar maniacal life, with only one difference that is resenting all religions. The mention of the bible would annoy him noticeably. Another Jewish fellow had described to me how his orthodox Jewish brother hates his guts because of his secular lifestyle. Yet, the secular fellow would not conduct any business with me without mentioning or referring to the Middle East conflict, as if I was a Head of State, or was Yasser Arafat, in some sort of disguise. On the Muslim side, I can recall many instances when a daughter or a son of religious parents goes berserk with no hope for returning to normality. I doubt also the assumption that living in a foreign community was a major factor in her total confusion and rebellion, because even in the heart of Islamic communities there exist many cases of such absurdity of behavior and reasoning.
What makes me strongly believe in her inevitable destiny is the fact that she has the ability to raise many questions about Islam but never strived to dig deeper in the heart of the religion. For example, she was and still content with the fallacy that Prophet Muhammed had ordered his army to kill a Jewish tribe, which contradicts history, Hadeeth, and the spirit of Islam. Also, she naively generalizes everything her pathological family has done and applies it on the whole world of Islam. In the Muslim world, as well as in any other society, there are low livers and there are decent people. Had she adopted such curiosity into the driving causes of her deviance, she might have found an exit from her vicious cycle of confusion and despair. How many abused Christian women who were raped, injured, or forced to live on the streets by an abusive family member and who blamed Christianity for her misery? Irshad's small and dark world is an aberration that happens across cultures. Her blaspheming of Islam is only a blame game for self-gratification and revenge form her tormentors. Her mentioning of her obnoxious cousin also supports my theory, since Irshad's writing is apparently obnoxious. This trait runs in her lineage. She never credited her mother for selling Avon and her father for his hard work to support her and send her to school. She does not comprehend the reality that her father's primitive behavior might be attributed to his ignorance rather than his malicious intention.
On the open-lesbian lifestyle, I like to mention this story. I recall my early days as medical intern in the obstetrics round when a supervising physician was explaining a symptom that a newly arrived pregnant woman had shown. The pregnant woman arrived to the ER for delivery and soon requested to go to the woman's room. The attending physician warned that that must be the onset of labor confounding the desire for bowel movement. Few seconds later, the poor fetus was dropped into the toilet. Similar incidents occurred many times in the three months of my round. Similar confounding symptoms confuse the defecation reflex with sexual stimulation. Most probably, had people been educated about the reflexes of the bowels and those of the genital system, the issue of homosexuality might disappear from the social debate. I am sure it will never happen that all people would have access to the least of knowledge that empower them to avoid destructive behavior and social stigmatization. Yet, we should never give up on fellow humans. I hate to see gay's struggle for equality being confronted with oppressive majority, while both parties are entrenched in their bunkers, unwilling to exploit modern scientific advent for settling human agony. Instead of debating gay marriage, we should spread basic biological and physiological knowledge about reflexes and the meaning of their signals and that sexual activity should not become a death sentence when biological norms are respected. A politician like John Kerry panders to the gay community by claiming that one of his friends woke up in the morning and could not resist admit his gay inclination. Such deceptive pandering is meant to grab votes for political gains but exploits the confusion of a suffering segment of society.
Irshas's claim that she is an open lesbian raises my suspicion in her desire to invoke resentment by others. Her father has definitely demonstrated his affection with sadistic conduct in a similar fashion to her malicious insults on Islam without thorough justification. She contends that learning Arabic for the sake of understanding the Koran is futile while she praising Judaism, which is best, understood in Hebrew. Myself, and many others in my generation, learned at least three foreign languages beside Arabic in order to understand the world better. Her desire for short cuts and fast gratification are signs of her restless mind. Or, may be I am being too obsessed with genetic destiny. God only knows. Yet, the book should have been better given a different name such as "A lost soul", "Like father like daughter", or "An Exercise in Absurdity".
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