[Tariqas] More On Dr Wafa Sultan

Sun Mar 19 12:49:47 CST 2006

Her views seems one-eyed ignoring the complex factors that are into effect. 

To claim that no single Jew (or in a general sense no single Christian, or  
Western.....name it) did such and such crazy harmful thing to humanity is  such 
a blind view and looking to Muslims through a narrow magnifying glasses  that 
does not make her see the rest of the world, except through her  imagination. 

This is not to defend any extreme behavior of Muslims either, but just to  
say it is not fair to speak of the crazy harmful extreme behavior as peculiarly  
belonging to Muslims. She has gone to the same extreme she is critisizing.

I like what Lobster said better. Indeed, he can swim better than her  into 
the World's Vast Ocean!

Salaam
Amany

In a message dated 3/19/2006 10:41:47 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
tanzen at sbcglobal.net writes:

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.”

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