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Arab-American woman takes on the mullahs

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: A Syrian-American Muslim woman doctor has received several death threats after criticising in a television interview the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she said had “distorted” the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the Quran for 14 centuries.

Dr Wafa Sultan, a 47-year-old psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, was interviewed on Al Jazeera Television about three weeks ago. According to a report in the New York Times, she is being hailed by some as a “fresh voice of reason” and by others as a “heretic and infidel who deserves to die”. Her interview has had a million hits on the Internet and has been circulated through email to countless people. She said that the world’s Muslims, whom she compares unfavourably with the Jews, have “descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence”. What is happening today is “a battle between modernity and barbarism, which the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose”.

“I believe that our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings,” she told the New York Times in an interview. “Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslims from these wrong beliefs.”

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

“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.”

The American Jewish Congress 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,” according to Neil B Goldstein, executive director of the Jewish group.

She is now working on a book with titled ‘The Escaped Prisoner: when God is a monster’.

“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,” she has said.

Dr Sultan began her writing on an Islamic reformist website which caught the attention of Al Jazeera. She was invited to debate an Algerian cleric last July, during which 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.”

According to the New York Times report, “Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and websites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on February 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute.”

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 civilisation and backwardness, between the civilised and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality.” She said she no longer practised Islam. “I am a secular human being,” she said.

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