Speaking before some 400 members of the National Council of Jewish Women’s Essex County Section at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills on Oct. 11, the diminutive Manji said she has emboldened thousands of young Muslims to challenge sexist doctrine and has even helped a few redirect their focus toward democracy and away from advocating terror.

Born in Uganda and raised in western Canada, Manji is a journalist, television producer, and self-described lesbian and feminist.

She is best known for her 2003 book, The Trouble with Islam Today, which railed against the treatment of women in Islam, criticized Muslim anti-Semitism, and called for an end to what she calls the “scourge of slavery” in Islamic countries.

Currently on tour promoting the paperback, Manji spoke extemporaneously for more than an hour, using a hand-held microphone while she paced back and forth onstage.

Manji said her book has “angered the vast majority of Muslims around the world. I have 1.3 billion people mad at me. That may be more people mad at me than are mad at George W. Bush. That is not a distinction in which I take pride.”

But, she said, “many, many younger Muslims, especially women, are asking me, ‘Where did you find’ — they never use the word chutzpa — ‘the guts, the fortitude, the nerve to speak out despite the threats against your life?’ I tell them probably the most effective tool in my journey to justice has been the willingness to ask questions out loud.”

Manji said she developed that habit as a child in the Islamic religious school she attended as a child — challenging a male teacher’s assertions “that women cannot lead prayer” and ‘that Jews were treacherous — not to be trusted. That the Jews worshiped moola — not Allah.’”

At the age of 14 those questions “got me booted out of the madrassa.”

So Manji studied Islam privately for the next 20 years “and discovered I don’t have to take a back seat to anybody in my religion simply because I’m a woman. Freedom of information,” she said, “saved my faith in Islam.”

But that freedom forced her to confront her conscience 25 years later, when a boss asked her to reconcile her faith with what he called “the insanity” of a 17-year-old Muslim woman in Nigeria being whipped for having premarital sex, “even though she had actually proved she had been raped.”

“My integrity told me it was right to ask that question, and my conscience was shaken by it,” Manji said. That in turn led her to ask, “What else is happening to the women of Islam in the name of Islam?”

She went on to research “honor killings” and other injustices against women living under Islamic regimes. In Saudi Arabia — “America’s good buddy” — women “are in fact property by law,” she said. In Iran, if a woman “is suspected of lesbianism, she will be draped in a pristine white sheet, lowered into a freshly dug dirt pit, and stoned alive.”

“I knew there was no running away from my conscience,” said Manji.

While writing the book, Manji met Salman Rushdie, the Indian writer who has faced fatwas — religious death warrants — when his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses was declared blasphemous by Iranian clerics.

Manji said Rushdie told her, “A book is more important than a life” because its ideas are “a permanent gift that the writer gives. I loved his answer, first because I’m nuts and then because it was so genuine. He was implying that the purpose with which you live is sometimes more important than the numbers of years with which you live,” she said.

The activist said numerous death threats against her “continue to this day.” They prompted her briefly to hire a bodyguard, “and boy was he hot,” she joked. “Just because I’m a lesbian doesn’t mean I can’t empathize with gay guys and straight women. But four months after I got him, I ditched him.

“I figured if I’m going to have credibility with young Muslims that it is possible to dissent from the clerics and live, I can’t have a big, burly dude looking out for me everywhere I go. That would be hypocritical,” she said.

Manji said the open criticism of Islam emboldened other young Muslims to read her book on-line — in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi. She boasted that more than 150,000 people have downloaded the text from her Web site.

She said her writing triggered “underground” discussion groups that she hopes some day will no longer be sub rosa.

Manji’s meeting with Rushdie even inspired one reader, an English Muslim, to abandon his training as a terrorist. “It touched him, because he was reminded that he had the innate permission to ask questions.” He acknowledged that he needs “only the approval of his creator and his conscience, and his creator resides in his conscience,” she said.

He now works with Manji in luring other potential terrorists away from violence.

Manji urged her audience not to be afraid to “ruffle feathers.”

“By questioning an abusive status quo you are creating a space where those who follow in your footsteps will now be seen as more legitimate and much more believable,” she said, “because you have raised the bar for what is imaginable.”