Hot Chick / Cool Woman - Irshad Manji

Irshad Maniji could be Adhaalathu Party and Osama's worst nightmare...

Irshad Manji, a lesbian feminist Muslim and, say many, one of the bravest women alive, has revealed the horrors of the first time it sunk in how barbaric her own religion could be: she was aged 10 and her father was chasing her through the house with a kitchen knife.

Manji, who has received numerous death threats as a result of her campaign to highlight how Islam oppresses millions of its followers, had threatened to report her father to the police for the way he regularly beat his wife.

Born in 1968 in Idi Amin's Uganda, but living in Canada when the attack happened, Manji escaped to a hiding place on the roof. There, she tells the Observer, she had an epiphany. "I realised I was grateful because there were people I could go to, talk to, whereas if we'd still been in East Africa that may not have been the case.

"I realised I lived in a society where the story of who we are as a people was not finished, which meant that I, as an individual, mattered. I could be a partial author of this grander story."

Manji, who now lives in New York behind bulletproof windows and dares not own a mobile phone in case it can be used to track her down, is best known for her book, The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith, published in 2004. It has been a huge bestseller in the West but has been banned across most of the Middle East. The New York Times has compared her to Martin Luther and called her "Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare".

In the new interview, she says that a much later moment of realisation came when she was working at a religious television station and her (Jewish) boss put a newspaper cutting on her desk. It was the story of a young woman in northern Nigeria who had been sentenced by a sharia court to 180 lashes for a sexual offence, even though she had seven male witnesses to testify that she had been raped. Her boss had scribbled in the margin: "Irshad, one of these days you'll tell me how you reconcile this kind of insanity and female genital mutilation with your Muslim faith."

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