[lit-ideas] Muslim Woman Denounces Violence, Gets Death Threats
- From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 13:06:30 -0500
Here's a hopeful voice, albeit a threatened
one....from today's Times.
For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam,
Violent Threats
[from
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin]
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: March 11, 2006
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."
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