[Tariqas] More On Dr Wafa Sultan

Sun Mar 19 09:41:14 CST 2006

Times  (London)  March 19, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2092167,00.html

Women at war with the mullahs

What drives a woman to risk a fatwa by attacking Islam. Christopher  
Goodwin reports

It would be hard to imagine a place more remote from the violence and  
turmoil of the Middle East than this quiet cul-de-sac in the southern  
suburbs of Los Angeles. But as David Sultan opens the front door of  
his home he glances up and down the street anxiously.
He has good reason to be nervous: ever since Dr Wafa Sultan, his  
wife, appeared on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network, last  
summer she has been receiving death threats. During that and a second  
broadcast in February Dr Sultan, who was brought up as a Muslim in  
Syria, denounced the teachings and practice of Islam as “barbaric”  
and “medieval”.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of  
religions, or a clash of civilisations,” the impassioned 47-year-old  
told Al-Jazeera’s stunned audience across the Arab world. “It is a  
clash between civilisation and backwardness, between the civilised  
and the primitive,                         between barbarity and  
rationality. It is a clash between human rights on the one hand and  
the violation of these rights on the other, between those who treat  
women like beasts and those who treat them like human beings.”

The broadcasts have caused an unholy stir in the Muslim world and  
virtually overnight have turned Sultan, previously known only to a  
few for her writings on www.annaqed.com, a small Arab-American  
website, into one of the most controversial figures in the  
international debate about Islam. The broadcasts have been downloaded  
more than 1m times from the internet and she has been interviewed on  
CNN and profiled by The New York Times and Le Monde.

While some acclaim her as “a voice of reason” others have denounced  
her as a “heretic” and insist that she deserves to die. What seems to  
have most infuriated many Muslims were Sultan’s comparisons between  
how Jews and Muslims have coped with the tragedies that have befallen  
them.

“The Jews have come from tragedy and forced the world to respect  
them,” she said, “with their knowledge, not with their terror; with  
their work, not with their crying and yelling.

“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. Only the Muslims  
defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and  
destroying embassies. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can  
do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Sitting in the airy living room of the spacious modern home where  
Sultan and her husband live, it is hard to believe this small, neatly  
dressed woman could be at the centre of an international firestorm.  
Just as improbable is that the most important and controversial  
critics of Islamic fundamentalism, violence and intolerance are, like  
Sultan, women, mostly from Islamic countries.

They include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician, who  
has strongly criticised Islamic attitudes towards women and the  
widespread practice of female circumcision in Muslim north Africa;  
Irshad Manji, a Canadian lesbian of Pakistani descent, whose book The  
Trouble with Islam Today chastises Islam for its aggression towards  
women and for its anti-semitism; Amina Wadud, an African-American  
convert to Islam and Muslim academic and author, who has infuriated  
traditional Muslims by leading Friday prayer for Muslims in New York,  
a role traditionally taken only by male imams.

Other Muslim women in the front lines of the clash with Islamic  
governments are as diverse as Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani village  
woman who was brutally gang-raped in 2002 as reprisal for an alleged  
transgression by her 14-year-old brother, and Shirin Ebadi, the  
Iranian lawyer who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2003 for her  
defence of the rights of women and children in fundamentalist Muslim  
Iran.

Death threats against these women are commonplace. Irshad Manji has  
had to install bullet-proof windows in her home. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has  
to travel everywhere with bodyguards after the threats against her  
and the death the film maker Theo van Gogh, her friend and collaborator.

Sultan never imagined her life would take this path. She was born to  
a large middle-class family in the Syrian port city of Banias. Her  
father was a grain trader, her mother a housewife. She has nine  
brothers and sisters. The family was devoutly Muslim and Sultan, who  
studied medicine at the University of Aleppo in Damascus, says she  
never had any reason to doubt her faith. But in 1979, when she was  
a                         student, she witnessed a horrifying crime.  
As she stood chatting with some other students on the university  
courtyard, armed members of the Muslim Brotherhood began shooting at  
one of her teachers, killing him on the spot.

“They filled his body with bullets as they shouted ‘Allahu akbar!  
Allahu akbar! (God is greatest!)’,” she recalls. She says they killed  
him because he was an Alawite, a member of the same Muslim sect as  
the Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, whom they wanted to overthrow,  
even though he had nothing to do with politics.

“This was the turning point of my life,” says Sultan. She began to  
reread the Koran closely, gradually coming to the conclusion that the  
violence and oppression of most Muslim governments and some of those  
fighting against them stemmed directly from the teachings of Islam.

“I began to question every single teaching,” she says. She noticed  
that “there are too many verses in the Koran which say you must kill  
those who are non-Muslim; you must kill those who don’t believe in  
Allah and his messenger. I started to ask: is this right? Is this  
human? All our problems in the Islamic world, I strongly believe, are  
the natural outcome of these teachings. Go open any book in any class  
in any school in any Islamic country and read it. You will see what  
kind of teachings we have: Islam tells its followers that every non- 
Muslim is your enemy.”

Sultan, who worked as a family practitioner in Syria after qualifying  
as a doctor, also speaks about the virulent anti-semitism that was  
inculcated in her and all Syrian children. This made her so terrified  
of Jews that she refused to act the part of the Israeli prime  
minister Golda Meir in a school play.

“Until I came to United States I used to believe that Jewish people  
are not human creatures,” she says. “Unfortunately this is the way I  
was brought up, to believe that Jews don’t have our human features,  
they don’t have our human voices.”

In the first week she was in the United States she and her husband  
went to a shoe shop in Hollywood. Her husband asked the clerk where  
he was from and when he said that he was an Israeli Jew, “you can’t  
believe what I did”, she says. “I ran away without shoes, barefoot.  
My husband followed me. He said, ‘How stupid you are.’ But I said, ‘I  
cannot tolerate him.’ I was scared to death because he was from  
Israel; I reacted in a very bad, negative way, because of the way I  
had been raised, for the past 30 years of my life.”

Sultan and her husband, who met when they were at university, moved  
to the United States in 1989 with two of their children. They have  
since had a third. As they struggled to establish themselves — for  
four years she worked as a cashier in convenience stores until his  
small business began to prosper — she started writing about Islam, at  
first for local Arab newspapers, until her writings brought threats  
against them. Three weeks before September 11 she helped set up the  
Annaqed (The Critic) website where she and other writers from the  
Muslim Middle East have been able to put forward their critical views  
of Islam.

Sultan, who is now close to completing her US medical qualifications  
— she plans to practise psychiatry — has written two books that can  
be read in Arabic and is finishing a third — The Escaped Prisoner:  
When God is a Monster — which she hopes will also be published in  
English.

Sultan has no intention of stopping her attacks on Islam even though  
she and her family in Syria have been threatened. Two of her brothers  
have been interrogated by the Syrian secret police, she says, since  
the Al-Jazeera broadcasts. In fact, Sultan’s long intellectual  
journey has brought her to a radical conclusion: that reform of Islam  
is impossible.

“Muslims have been hostages of their beliefs and their teachings for  
14 centuries,” she says. “I believe the time has come and the truth  
should be spoken. I know that I am waging a very difficult war. It is  
going to take years. I might not be able to see it in my life, but I  
am strongly sure that the next generation will see the fruits of my  
writing and my message.”