By Geoff Olson

Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore
Book review by Geoff Olson

The publisher of this magazine once pointed out that Michael Moore's chief weapon is his outward appearance. The overweight, pigeon-toed shlump in a baseball cap with the folksy demeanor looks distinctly non-threatening - even with a microphone in his hand.

And this guileless, working-class persona - less a disguise than an identity he undoubtedly found too useful to dismiss as he climbed the ladder of success - has allowed Moore some priceless moments with PR hacks and flacks, CEOs and politicians. In past television series like TV Nation, it was always a joy to see these automatons lower their visors just enough for the rumpled everyman to disintegrate them with their own press releases.

Moore's appearance isn't the only thing working in his favour. If there ever was an argument for a guardian angel (or divine intervention), the bio of the man from Flint, Michigan is it. Beginning with his 1989 documentary film Roger and Me, one media success has piggybacked on another, taking the baseball-capped populist to the top of the bestseller lists and the Oscar ceremonies.

Moore's lucky streak peaked with the weird synchronicity of the printing of his previous book, Stupid White Men, on the day before September 11, 2001. The books were ready for delivery the next day, but events left them in publishing limbo. The timing was all wrong, it was thought. A librarian in New York got word that the publisher planned to kill the book entirely and pulp the 10,000 printed copies that sat in a warehouse. The librarian then led a successful campaign among her colleagues to revive the book, helping drive it straight to the New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller list.

The latter tale is told in his latest book, a work that contains enough gems to make it a worthwhile addition to his multimedia oeuvre. Seven Questions for George Bush details the bizarre and creepy business connections between the Texas Bush family and the Saudi Arabian bin Laden dynasty, which go back decades. Horatio Alger Must Die deconstructs the American myth of a class-free society where anyone can go to the top if they work hard enough. There is wit and wisdom in equal parts. If there's anything wrong here, the tone may be too breezy, but Moore is obviously reaching beyond the Harper's/Nation crowd for a reading audience.

Having met Moore in the flesh, I got the impression he really is the everyman he appears to be on camera. Here's a guy who champions the wisdom of the people - or at least the possibility of informed choice, if they're given the right information. Dude, Where's My Country? gets its title from the woeful fact that 11 percent of Americans cannot identify their own country on a map, with Yankee ignorance of the whereabouts of other nations ascending dramatically beyond their own borders.

The author and filmmaker's campaign against the dumbing down of the American population is a package deal; if they get the goods on the "President select," George W. Bush, by next November, Moore feels the Republicans will be bounced from office. Much of the material here will come as a total surprise to American readers, but there's also enough here to shock Moore fans in Canada, a nation he applauds for not being "like us," even while he fears we may be on a path that may erase this cultural distinction. Dude, read the book.

Warner Books, 2003.

Cutline:
One media success has piggybacked on another, taking the baseball-capped populist to the top of the bestseller lists and the Oscar ceremonies.

The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change
by Irshad Manji
Book review by Geoff Olson

Irshad Manji is the Canadian media's latest "It" girl, taking the tiara from No Logo author Naomi Klein. Manji is all over the place these days, on CBC TV, in the papers and in the pages of Maclean's, promoting her The Trouble With Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change. Not surprisingly, considering the title, the spiky-haired, 30-something author travels with a bodyguard, and has had bulletproof glass installed in her Toronto apartment.

Manji's contrarian attitude to her faith began early, while in her madrasah in Richmond. The Pakistani girl wanted to get past her student text, Know Your Islam, and study the Koran itself. Unfortunately, the holy book was only available in Arabic. "Most Muslims have no idea what we're saying when we're reciting the Koran in Arabic," she writes of a language which clerics regard as inseparable from the faith. Translation, she learned, is thought to "corrupt the text."

In a slightly older incarnation as a "mall-rat," Manji found an English translation of the Koran at the local mall, Lansdowne Centre. Her questions only grew, along with her outrage at the misogyny, anti-Semitism and lack of self-examination she saw in her Islamic upbringing.

The author doesn't sugarcoat the excesses of her faith, and in some ways the book is a welcome counterpoint to the parade of Muslim clerics who disowned the hijackers in the wake of 9/11, claming they weren't followers of the "true Islam." In one page, Manji cites the Koran's own ambiguous words about killing, and asks who has ownership of which version of the faith. But the Koran is certainly no how-to guide for terrorists, either. Manji demonstrates that what's been said of the Bible applies to the Koran: a book is like a mirror, and if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out.

Like the other two great axial religions, Christianity and Judaism, with which it shares a great amount of narrative DNA, Islam is a many-textured thing, containing both shadows and light.

The problem with Islam is one thing, but there's also a problem with this book. There's the cover, for one thing, with Manji's long face prominently displayed above the subtitle, A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change, with her looking past the reader to the millions of Muslims who've presumably hit the post-Enlightenment snooze button. The content follows suit. Each page is littered with multiple "I"s, and unnecessary expressions like "Excuse me?!" It's not so much that Islam has to answer to the women of the world, it seems, as to Manji herself.

As a dark-skinned Islamic woman, Manji - an insider to the faith - is given licence, at least by her publisher, to go medieval on the followers of Allah. As a clever Western-educated, cosmopolitan, lesbian author, she's the Islamic fundamentalist's worst nightmare - which makes her confrontational stance all the more questionable. If you're up against such unyielding dogmatism, what is the use of rhetorical overload? But since the book starts off as a letter written to Muslims, one wonders if her intended audience is doubters within Islam, and perhaps Western readers all too ready to buy into any account that demonizes the religion further.

Obviously, there is plenty wrong with Islam, just as there is with most of the world's religions, but is it useful for an author, even a disaffected Muslim author, to belabour the obvious? We know the drill on the Taliban treatment of women, and the sorry state of affairs in Saudi Arabia. Manji wonders if the faith can be disentangled from the tribalism of its believers, which she believes amplifies the message of misogyny. She then examines the explosive issue of the complicity of her religion in 9/11, but goes too easy on successive US administrations, which lit the fuse of fundamentalist fury.

Still, Manji has some good insights, and if you can get past the hectoring, personal tone, she writes in a feisty, readable way. The multicultural vision of harmony, where we're "all the same but different," doesn't hold up well under her sharp gaze, and she counterpoints an utter lack of self-criticism in the Islamic world with the tradition of doubt found in the West. Still, I suspect with so many people knowing so little about Islam, a more measured, historical approach would serve readers better, rather than emotional jeremiads from troubled believers, who are hanging on to their faith by their fingernails, and demanding it morph into something they can endorse.

In her moral fervor and occasional rancor, Manji leaves one with a slightly puzzled feeling, like a United Church bishop who rejects the doctrine of Christ's divinity but remains in the fold (how far can you go in disowning the claims of your faith, and still reasonably call yourself a believer?). She believes that ultimately Islam should be salvaged rather than savaged - and if it comes down to such a choice, it's hard to disagree. But the idea that one-third of humanity will bend willingly to Western notions of feminism and individual autonomy seems optimistic to the point of naiveté. Especially given the explicitly Christian crusade of the Bush neocons against "evil-doers," it seems unlikely we will see any rapprochement this century between Islam and the other two major religions. Although one cannot but hope that women the world over are no longer oppressed by religious ideology of any kind, the author's demand that Islam change to her satisfaction seems uncomfortably consonant with the neocon expectation that the Mideast has the choice of accepting "democracy" willingly, or at the barrel of a gun.

Random House Canada, 2003.

Geoff Olson is a Vancouver writer and political cartoonist.