In honor of Banned Books month, we are featuring Irshad Manji who faced censorship and threats to her life because of her stance on freedom of speech and the rights of individuals to reinterpret religious doctrines in a contemporary world and Edward de Grazia, a lawyer who dedicated his life to fighting censorship.
Irshad Manji (born in 1968 in Uganda) is a Canadian educator and founder of the Moral Courage Project. Her mother is of Egyptian descent and her father is of Indian heritage. When Manji was four, Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of Asians and other non-Africans from Uganda. Her family arrived in Canada as refugees and settled near Vancouver. Manji attended public school and once a week she attended a religious school (madrasa). At 14, she was expelled from the madrasa for asking too many questions.
Manji earned a bachelor’s degree in the history of ideas from the University of British Columbia and became writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Hart House. She began writing her first book, The Trouble with Islam Today.
Manji is active in Canadian politics. She was a legislative aide in the Canadian Parliament for New Democratic Party member of parliament, Dawn Black before becoming press secretary in the Ontario government for Ontario New Democratic Party cabinet member Marion Boyd. She later worked as speechwriter for federal NDP leader Audrey Mc Laughlin.
She became the youngest national affairs editorialist for the Ottawa Citizen. Manji was also a columnist for Capital Xtra.
Manji hosted and produced public affairs programs on television including Q-Files for Pulse 24 and its successor QT: Queer Television for the Ontario based Citytv. She’s also appeared on Al Jazeera, the CBC, BBC, MSNBC, C-Span, CNN, PBS, Fox News Channel, CBS, and HBO.
While working as a visiting professor at NYU, Manji joined NYU’s Robert. F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service to create the Moral Courage Project an initiative to teach young people how to “speak truth to power within their own communities.” Manji’s course focus on learning to “make value-driven decisions for the sake of their integrity” in your personal and professional life. In April 2013, Moral Courage Tv was launched on YouTube.
The Trouble with Islam Today (published in 2004 by St. Martin’s Press and published as The Trouble with Islam in 2003 in Canada) has been translated into more than 30 languages. Manji offered Arabic, Persian, and Urdu translations of the book on her website for free-of-charge download. Her book has received praise and scorn from Muslim and non-Muslim sources. It is banned in many countries in the Middle East.
Faith without Fear, a 2007 PBS documentary by Manji follows her journey to reconcile faith and freedom and reveals the personal risks she has faced as a Muslim reformer.
Manji wrote Allah, Liberty and Love in 2011. She examines how Muslims can reinterpret the Qur’an, think more independently, and speak more freely. She supports the validity of interfaith marriages. Critics of her work include Muslim extremists who stormed her book launch and tried to assault her to academics who feel her approach is passive. Her book tour in Indonesia had to be cut short after threats from the Islamic Defenders Front. Men from the Indonesian Mujahedeen assaulted Manji’s team and her supporters in Yogyakarta. Shortly after the government of Malaysia banned her book. The ban was lifted in 2013.
Her latest work, Don’t Label Me is written as an imaginary conversation with her first dog, Lily, who is now deceased. Lily plays Devil’s advocate as Manji advocates rising above tribalism and learning to discuss differences with an open mind and heart. She argues that along with teaching young people how not to be offensive, we must teach them not to be offended in order for meaningful discussions to take place.
She has received numerous death threats because of her views, yet Manji continues to speak out and remains open to the evolution of her own beliefs.
Sources for this article:
https://freespeechchampions.com/heroes/
Image of Irshad Manji taken from above article with no intention of copyright infringement.
Edward de Grazia (1927-2013) was a lawyer and university professor who specialized in defending the creators of expressive works from obscenity laws and related charges. He was a fierce opponent of censorship. His best-known clients include Henry James, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and comedian Lenny Bruce. He also defended anti-war demonstrators.
Edward de Grazia was born in Chicago and served in the United States Army during World War II. After his service, de Grazia earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and received his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago Law School. He practiced law in Washington, D.C., and from 1956-1959, he worked with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris. After returning to the United States, de Grazia taught at several law schools in the Washington, D.C. area before becoming one of the founding members of the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York in 1976. DeGrazia taught there for three decades.
De Grazia wrote a dozen plays during his lifetime and a textbook on obscenity law.
DeGrazia’s book. Girls Lean Back Everywhere, (1992) is considered an authoritative study of artistic censorship, touching on works by James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, Vladimir Nabokov, D.H. Lawrence, artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and the rap group 2 Live Crew.
De Grazia’s efforts to defend anti-war protestors in the 1960s is included in Norman Mailer’s book, Armies of the Night (1968). De Grazia helped secure the release of Mailer and other anti-war protestors who were arrested during multiple protests in Washington, D.C. in 1967.
In one of his last major cases, Mr. de Grazia won an appeals court ruling in 1969 that allowed theaters to show the Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).”
He believed the government had no right to control the content of printed and visual works. He referred to laws against obscenity (when taken at face value) as an affront to liberty.
On numerous occasions, de Grazia successfully argued that the importance of the artistic and political themes in certain works exceeds occasional depictions of sexual acts.
Sources for this article:
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1576/edward-de-grazia
Image of Edward de Grazia taken from above article with no intention of copyright infringement.