By BARRY GEWEN

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji are two of the most prominent and outspoken critics of what they and others see as “mainstream Islam.
” Brilliant, dynamic women, they have each rebelled against a Muslim upbringing to become public figures with large and devoted followings. Both are successful authors: Ms. Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, “Infidel,” was a best seller; Ms. Manji’s combination memoir-polemic, “The Trouble With Islam Today,” has been published in almost 30 countries.
They are firm and unyielding in their support for the West, feminism, reason, freedom - and they have paid a price: both have been targets of death threats and have required protection .
Yet though they are allies on one level, their approaches to Islam are strikingly different, with one working outside the religion and one within. Ms. Hirsi Ali is an avowed atheist whose criticisms can be seen as attacks not only on radical Islamism but on the religion of Islam over all. About the September 11, 2001, attacks, she de- clared: “This is Islam,” and “not just Islam, this was the core of Islam.” The attacks forced her to decide “which side was I on-” she writes in “Infidel.” Her book is the story of how she chose the West.
For Ms. Manji, there has been no such either-or choice. She is a practicing Muslim who seeks to change her faith from within. As founder and director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University, she assists other maverick writers and scholars who dissent within their communities. “What I want,” Ms. Manji has said, “is an Islamic Reformation,” and in contrast to Ms. Hirsi Ali, she adds, there is “no need to choose between Islam and the West.”
Christopher Hitchens, the essayist who wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of “Infidel,” says the positions of the two women “can’t possibly be reconciled.”
Both Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji come from non-Arab Muslim backgrounds. This may be one reason for their opposition to Islamic orthodoxy, which they see as inherently Arab, or Arab-dominated.
Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Somalia, and lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya before fleeing to the Netherlands when she was 22 to avoid an arranged marriage. When her family was in Saudi Arabia, she remembers her father’s complaining that the Saudis had perverted the true Islam. “He thought it was all barbaric, all Arab desert culture,” she writes.
Ms. Manji was born in 1968 in Uganda, but her family, part Egyptian and part Indian, moved to Canada when she was 4 . She is even more insistent than Ms. Hirsi Ali in drawing a distinction between Islam and Arab tribal culture, its “dictatorship from the desert.” Who elected the Saudi monarch “to be Islam’s steward-” she asks.
The difference between them may be due to the fact that Ms. Manji was raised in the warm, liberal, welcoming precincts of British Columbia . Ms. Hirsi Ali’s early years, by contrast, consisted of dictatorship, war, patriarchy, genital cutting, confinement and beatings . Ms. Manji says, “Had I grown up in a Muslim country, I’d probably be an atheist in my heart.”
No element more thoroughly informs the work of both women than feminism. Yet as feminists, Ms. Hirsi Ali and Ms. Manji are demanding more than equality; they are very self-consciously challenging the foundations of an entire way of life.
“The most important explanation for the mental and material backlog we Muslims find ourselves in,” Ms. Hirsi Ali has said, “should probably be sought in the sexual morality that we were force-fed from birth.”
Ms. Manji, too, sees feminism as crucial for Islamic reform. “Empowering women,” she says, “is the way to awaken the Muslim world.” But she is not only a committed feminist: she is also an open lesbian .
The two women have known each other for four years, since Ms. Hirsi Ali interviewed Ms. Manji for a Dutch newspaper, and they discussed their continuing relationship in e-mail interviews. They immediately bonded - understandably enough.
“I could not believe she was not an atheist,” Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “and she could not believe that I had become one.” Ms. Manji admires Ms. Hirsi Ali’s determination to confront power, saying that “Ayaan’s defiant distrust of Muslim authorities can help generate debates that move us closer to honesty.”
But, inevitably, the differences between them create tensions since, in their eyes, what is at stake is nothing less than the future of Islam. Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “Irshad is the most admirable person I know who is trying to achieve change from within,” but she agrees with Mr. Hitchens that “from an intellectual, logical perspective,”
Ms. Manji’s religious faith and her own secularism can’t be reconciled.
Ms. Manji detects a certain incoherence in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s views: She wants Muslims to reform, but she also seems to believe that Islam is inherently retrograde.” Ms. Manji says her own position “is that Muslims can reform while remaining faithful precisely because the Koran has the raw materials to be thoughtful and humane.
It’s we Muslims who must develop the courage to change.”