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Irshad Manji is the best-selling author of The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim’s Call to Reform in Her Faith. It is being published throughout North America and Europe. Arabic and Urdu translations are underway, as is a documentary.
Manji wrote this book 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.
Her communications background allows Manji to engage a multitude of audiences. Among them: the Oxford Union, the United Nations Press Corps, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, the Pentagon and the Amsterdam-based Archives of the International Women’s Movement. She is a frequent guest on media as varied as NPR, FOX and the BBC. Her writings 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 is the holder of an honors degree in history from the University of British Columbia. In 1990, she won the Governor-General’s medal for top graduate – the first humanities student to earn this distinction at UBC. After graduation, she 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, Manji 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 Queer Television on Toronto’s Citytv. This was 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 nominations for the Gemini, Canada’s highest broadcasting award, and it won for best-edited information show. Manji also negotiated the syndication of Queer Television through San Francisco-based web portal planeout.com, making Queer Television 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.
Books remain Manji’s passion. In 1997, she wrote Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New Democracy. This book chronicles how young people are re-defining democracy in an age of fluid media networks, shifting social values and flexible personal identities. Risking Utopia is widely used by Canadian educators to re-imagine public schooling.
Oprah Winfrey recently honored Manji with her first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction.” Ms. magazine named Manji a “Feminist for the 21st Century.” And this past June, she received the Simon Wiesenthal Award of Valor.
Manji is now launching Project Ijtihad, an initiative to revive Islam’s lost tradition of independent thinking.
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