Irshad Manji - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Manji was born near Kampala, Uganda in 1968 and she is of mixed descent. Her family moved to Canada when she was four, as a result of Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians. She and her family settled near Vancouver in Richmond, British Columbia in 1972, and she grew up attending both a secular and an Islamic religious school. Manji excelled in the secular environment but, by her own account, was expelled from her religious school for asking too many questions. For the next twenty years, she studied Islam via public libraries and Arabic tutors. Manji earned an honours degree in the history of ideas from the University of British Columbia. In 1990, she won the Governor General's Medal for top humanities graduate. She is openly lesbian.

Read more about this topic:  Irshad Manji

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
    Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;
    Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

    At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    ... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.
    Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)