A workplace challenge to Muslim identity launched Manji’s anti-Islam polemic

Evidence

The fundamentalist religious schools she is compelled to attend, where Manji learns such truths as that Islam does not permit excessive laughter, and where she never hears stories and histories as she does in the Sunday school she was also permitted to attend because her father saw it as babysitting, provide the basis from which Manji learns that there is trouble with Islam. The trouble does not crystallize until the day that Manji’s boss, Moses Znaimer, the owner of an important Toronto television station, demands in a memo to know whether she can reconcile her faith as a Muslim with female genital mutilation or with the public lashing of a seventeen-year-old Nigerian girl who was sexually assaulted by three men but who was punished for having sex outside of marriage. Brushing aside the aggression of the question (could Manji, an employee, have asked her Jewish boss to defend Israeli policies towards Palestinians?), Manji appreciates only what she sees as the reasonableness of the question, and it launches her on a journey to determine if the fault really lies with Islam. She concludes that it does. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 232

Categorization

• QUESTION: The power asymmetry of the boss-employee memo is scathing — worth probing whether the ‘insider critique’ genre structurally depends on such one-way cultural interrogation.