What she has to say - that Islam has become calcified and that in its name millions of people around the world are being denied human rights - is offensive to many and troubling even to progressive Muslims and non-Muslims who agree with her but wouldn't say so out loud, for fear of provoking what she calls the beards and the veils. She can't seem to move without annoying someone; she is also loathed by those ghastly, blogging Christians who prefer Muslims to be the enemy and think they should be converted or stay in their 'own' countries.
Where has she got it from, this nice-looking, petite girl (she was born in 1968 but appears much younger) from suburban Vancouver? How did she get the nerve to become one of the leading voices demanding reform of one of the world's great religions, at a time when Islam has become so controversial?
Irshad Manji arrived in Canada at the age of four as a refugee from Idi Amin's Uganda. One night, when she was 10, her father chased her through the house with a kitchen knife after she threatened to report him to the police and social services for his violence towards her mother. Hiding on the roof, out of reach, she had an epiphany - or that's how she tells it now: '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.'
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3:28 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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