Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup metatuning Great critique of Islam from a Syrian woman

March 11, 2006
The Saturday Profile

Muslim's Blunt Criticism of Islam Draws Threats

By JOHN
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/john_m_broder/
index.html?inline=nyt-per> M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, March 10 - Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely
unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a
deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera
television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh
voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves
to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million
times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world,
Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and
political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad
and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews,
have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or
cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the
forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her
telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic
reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most
widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to
say even in private.

"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she
said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined
slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest
manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this
backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these
wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how
the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust,
she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to
respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work,
not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German
restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen
a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down
churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield
any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind,
before they demand that humankind respect them."

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited
her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with
her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for
her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director
of the organization.

She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus.
Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel.
One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the
Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that - if it is published - it's going to
turn the Islamic world upside down."

"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I
am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a
small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her
father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's
strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at
the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical
Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of
President Hafez
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/hafez_al_assad
/index.html?inline=nyt-per> al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst
into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched,
she said.

"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she
said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all
our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to
this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid
plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and
the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in
with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge
of Los Angeles County.

After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has
completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital
residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an
automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area
and put their children through local public schools. All are now American
citizens.

BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr.
Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then
for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian
expatriate in Phoenix.

An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood
caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian
cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young
people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man,
in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she
asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is
the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was
quenched."

Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in
Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she
appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated
and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as
Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a
million times.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or
a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two
opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs
to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century.
It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized
and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she
said.

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of
religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He
then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had
blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious
condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats
on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an
e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill
you, it would be me."

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact
her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said
she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than
she did for her own.

"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a
million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10
miles."

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