Hussein Ibish blasts Irshad Manji for being an ‘anti-Arab racist’:
[...]
All trouble, real or imagined, “with Islam” in Manji’s account boils down to one central negative influence: the Arabs. Everything is their fault. Manji has virtually nothing positive to say about not only the Arabs in general or their culture (about which she seems blissfully ignorant) and almost nothing positive to say about any individual Arab either.
I haven’t read Manji’s book (better things to do with my time), but based on the passages Ibish cites, it really does look like an ignorant rant against Arabs. While it is true that with a little more understanding we can see how numerous cultures influenced what we broadly refer to ‘Islam’ (as a religious tradition, history, etc), she seems to have gone far too much in the other direction in stating there was almost no Arab influence, or whatever influence there was has been corrupting. This very notion is silly for any number of reasons, starting with the simple fact that Arabic is the lingua franca of Islamic religious tradition.
Her obsession with ‘desert Arabs’, based on Ibish’s citations, is stupid and an example of crude anti-Arab depictions. Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad — all Arab cities — are or were centres of learning and crucially cities in which institutions can develop, goods can be traded, and ideas can be exchanged, i.e. not empty deserts full of primitive savages.
