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, early, life and/or education:

    Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.
    James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)

    Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don’t see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.
    Donald Sinden (b. 1923)

    It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)