September 21, 2004
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu

Activist and author Irshad Manji will deliver the lecture The Trouble with Islam: Why I Fight for Women, Jews and Pluralism at UCSB Campbell Hall

Summary Facts:

• Irshad Manji
• Confessions of a Muslim Reformer: Why I Fight for Women, Jews and Pluralism
• Manji is the author of the best-selling The Trouble with Islam
• Wednesday, October 27
• 8 pm / UCSB Campbell Hall
• General public $10 / UCSB students $8
• Tickets/Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535

Irshad Manji, best-selling author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, will deliver the powerful lecture Confessions of a Muslim Reformer: Why I Fight for Women, Jews and Pluralism on Wednesday, October 27 at 8 pm at UCSB Campbell Hall. Irshad Manji, a faithful Muslim, is a recipient of the Simon Wiesenthal Award of Valor and has also received Oprah Winfrey’s first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve and conviction.” The New York Times claimed, “If we survive this current war without unthinkable casualties, it will be because Irshad Manji’s kind of liberalism didn’t lose its nerve. Think of Manji as a nerve ending for the West—shocking, raw, but mercifully, joyously, still alive.”

Manji considers herself a Muslim voice of reform reaching out to concerned citizens of all faiths worldwide. Her goal is to show Muslims how to rediscover Islam’s lost tradition of independent thinking—a tradition known as ijtihad—and thereby update Islam for the 21st century. On a recording found on her website www.muslim-refusenik.com, Manji refers to ijtihad as “independent thinking, the backbone for the curiosity and achievement that Islam exuded between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Think of it as the alternative nine-eleven, an intellectually vibrant nine-eleven.”

Elsewhere on the website she explains her goals by laying out two over-arching questions. She writes, “I’m asking Muslims in the West a very basic question: Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very pluralism that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place? My question for non-Muslims is equally basic: Will you succumb to the intimidation of being called ‘racists,’ or will you finally challenge us Muslims to take responsibility for our role in what ails Islam?”

Manji wrote The Trouble with Islam while serving as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Hart House. She currently hosts Big Ideas, a television program co-produced by public education channel TVOntario and the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Aimed at college and university students, Big Ideas showcases innovative thinkers from around the world. She is a frequent guest on media as varied as NPR, FOX and the BBC. Her opinion pieces can be found in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, OUT, Time and Glamour. She serves as a volunteer on Seventeen magazine’s inter-faith editorial board.

Manji’s family escaped the repression and terror of Idi Amin’s Uganda and settled outside of Vancouver, Canada in 1972. She attended the University of British Columbia and earned an honors degree in history. In 1990, she won the Governor-General’s medal for top graduate—the first humanities student to earn this distinction at UBC. After graduation, Manji became legislative aide to a member of parliament, press secretary to the Ontario Minister for Women’s Issues and speechwriter for the first female leader of a Canadian political party. In-between, she entered the media as a national affairs editorialist for the Ottawa Citizen, the youngest person to sit on the editorial board of a Canadian daily newspaper.

Later, Manji produced and hosted Toronto’s Queer Television, the world’s first program on commercial airwaves to explore the lives of gay and lesbian people. In its first two seasons Queer Television earned three Gemini nominations, Canada’s highest broadcasting award. Manji also negotiated the syndication of Queer Television through San Francisco-based web portal planeout.com, making the program one of the first TV shows to be streamed entirely on the internet. As such, it built a global audience quickly while circumventing state censors.

Courtesy of Borders, books by Irshad Manji will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

Irshad Manji is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures.

Tickets for the event are $10 for the general public and $8 for UCSB students. They are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.

Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.