Unlike Hirsi Ali, however, Manji takes a much broader view about women in Islam. She places the question in the general context of civil rights in Islam. Here she focuses in particular on the status of minorities. Manji maintains that as a civilization Islam has never treated minorities with respect, only with contempt. She does mention that during the golden age of Islam, Jews and Christians held significant positions within the empire. But, she says, this cannot cover for the systematic treatment of them as "different." In comparison, she argues, Israel has a far better record of treating its minorities. As evidence of this, she recounts a number of anecdotes from her visit to Israel. An Arab actress headlined a local production of My Fair Lady. Jews and Arabs alike take to the op-ed pages of newspapers like Ha'aretz to debate political issues. Religious literacy is part of military training for the armed forces. Street signs are labeled in Arabic, and Arabic is an official language of Israel. And she calls Israel's systematic discrimination against its Arab citizens a form of "affirmative action" for Jews.

To show how disingenuous this line of argument is, let's turn the situation around. Consider the case of the Jewish minority in Morocco. Jews have lived in the country for more than 2,000 years. Newspapers regularly carry news of the community's cultural and religious events. Jews and Muslims venerate the same saints. Serge Berdugo, a Jew, served as minister of tourism in the 1990s and is now an ambassador at large. André Azoulay, the current adviser to the king, is Jewish. So is the country's most popular comedian, Gad El Maleh, and one of its most celebrated novelists, Edmond Amran El Maleh. One could put together a virtually endless list of these facts, but none of them would detract from this other truth: Last year, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 88 percent of Moroccans have a negative view of Jews; as shameful as this figure is, any serious discussion of Morocco's Jewish minority would have to include it. Meanwhile, in Israel, the Haifa-based Center Against Racism found that 68 percent of Jews polled revealed they were unwilling to live next to an Arab neighbor. Acknowledging anti-Semitism in some parts of the Arab world, therefore, should not require us to gloss over anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings in Israel. This reductionist way of thinking permeates The Trouble With Islam Today and gets tiresome very quickly. When Manji argues that Arabs and Muslims must learn to think differently about their present, she writes, "liberal Muslims have to get vocal about this fact: Washington is the unrealized hope, not the lead criminal." For all her advocacy of new modes of thinking, she seems not to have entertained another possibility: Washington can be both.

The Caged Virgin and The Trouble With Islam Today are billed as profound meditations on faith and searing critiques of Islam's treatment of women and minorities, but they are riddled with inaccuracies and generalizations. In their persistent conflating of religion, civilization, geographical region and very distinct cultures, these books are more likely to obfuscate than educate.

None of this is to suggest that there are not serious issues facing Muslim women today. Still less does it mean that we should excuse violence and oppression, in some relativist fashion, because they happen to take place in the region broadly defined as "Islam." Those who believe in gender equality have every reason to be concerned about radical Islamist parties that view women as mere vessels, defined by their reproductive powers. These right-wing Islamist parties resist changes in civil codes that grant women more rights or, worse, want to impose antiquated and dangerous forms of Sharia. It is therefore particularly troubling that they have made electoral gains in Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere.

So now what? Where does this leave feminists of all stripes who genuinely care about the civil rights of their Muslim sisters? A good first step would be to stop treating Muslim women as a silent, helpless mass of undifferentiated beings who think alike and face identical problems, and instead to recognize that each country and each society has its own unique issues. A second would be to question and critically assess the well-intentioned but factually inaccurate books that often serve as the very basis for discussion. We need more dialogue and less polemic. A third would be to acknowledge that women--and men--in Muslim societies face problems of underdevelopment (chief among them illiteracy and poverty) and that tackling them would go a long way toward reducing inequities. As the colonial experience of the past century has proved, aligning with an agenda of war and domination will not result in the advancement of women's rights. On the contrary, such a top-down approach is bound to create a nationalist counterreaction that, as we have witnessed with Islamist parties, can be downright catastrophic. Rather, a bottom-up approach, where the many local, homegrown women's organizations are fully empowered stands a better chance in the long run. After all, isn't this how Western feminists made their own gains toward equality?

Muslim women are used as pawns by Islamist movements that make the control of women's lives a foundation of their retrograde agenda, and by Western governments that use them as an excuse for building empire. These women have become a politicized class, prevented by edicts and bombs from taking charge of their own destinies. The time has come for the pawns to be queened.

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