From the Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society, a book review by Irfan Khawaja, adjunct professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey, and lecturer in politics at Princeton University.
Along with perhaps a million other people, I’ve recently been reading Irshad Manji’s book The Trouble With Islam, a snappy little critique of contemporary Islam (and non-contemporary Islam) written from a heterodox Muslim perspective. .... I liked Manji’s book quite a lot while disagreeing vehemently with parts of it. Whatever its flaws, the book is well-written and well worth reading.
Being the diligent reviewer that I am, I was obliged to read all of the other reviews of Manji’s book, if only to ensure that I didn’t end up re-inventing the critic’s equivalent of the wheel while writing my own. The negative reviews, Muslim and non-Muslim, are an instructive mix of legitimate criticism, total nonsense, and outright denial. The latter two categories include some real doozies, but surfing Manji’s website the other day, I happened on a review of the book in The Nation (Lahore, Pakistan) by columnist Farrukh Khan Pitafi that pretty much takes the cake. ....
Khawaja’s detailed criticism of Pitafi’s review.
The sheer blustering incompetence of it would only be worth ignoring if it didn’t appear in a major newspaper in a major Pakistani city-in Lahore, supposedly the cultural and intellectual capital of Pakistan (and I might add, my family’s hometown). There should be something disconcerting about the fact that a location like that should produce trash like this. ... Pakistan suffers from a bit of censorship, but it is censorship of a fairly porous and sporadic variety. So the failure here is as much a matter of censorship as it is a matter of intellectual integrity. Saturated in arrogance but incapable of producing arguments worthy of junior high school, the Pitafis of the Pakistani intellectual scene (and not all of them, I should add, live or work in Pakistan) seek, desperately, "not for objections and difficulties," but for confirmations of their prejudices—confirmations that function as proxies for genuine knowledge. The sheer hostility with which they express themselves—and their ineptitude even at that—is an indication not of genuine conviction, but of the chronic self-doubt that characteristically accompanies fideism. ...
The question, ultimately, is less what the Pitafis of the world think than who will succeed them. The nightmare of being replaced in public esteem by a "lecherous" lesbian ijtihadi is perhaps more than such brittle souls can endure. All the more reason to make the nightmare a reality. One person’s nightmare, after all, is another person’s agenda. In this light, whatever my criticisms, I’m delighted to say that the Manji phenomenon could well be a nightmare come true. |