A voice of reason to the Muslim world?

Dr. Wafa Sultan is a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

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 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."

article reprint from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.html?ei=5090&en=d13886daba5e586f&ex=1299733200&partner=rssus&pagewanted=print

On 9/11, an ecumenical reality check

Ira Rifkin is a Baltimore Jewish Times columnist.

In January 1985, the Los Angeles newspaper I worked for assigned me to the religion beat. My first story was a feature on what was then a new phenomenon in Southern California, a fully licensed Muslim parochial school.

About 35 youngsters attended South Pasadena's New Horizon Preschool and Kindergarten. It was the first of its kind in Los Angeles County and it operated under the auspices of the Islamic Center of Southern California, then as now one of this nation's preeminent Muslim institutions. New Horizon's purpose, I was told, was "to teach the values of Islam to the new generation."


New Horizon, which now has grown considerably over the past two decades and now has several branches, was my introduction to Islam and to Muslims. Since then I've spent considerable professional time exploring the American Muslim community. I've also sought out participation in Jewish-Muslim interfaith activities; I've broken bread with Muslims at their homes and at mine, and at the White House at official presidential Ramadan break-the-fast events.

I fully embraced, even relished, these opportunities. Information and dialogue, I believed, could lower if not eliminate the barriers of suspicion that kept Muslims and Jews from understanding each others' hopes and fears. We live in the United States, not the Middle East, I told myself. Here, reason might prevail.

Sadly, I no longer have much faith in that coming to pass. Five years after the Twin Towers crashed and the Pentagon burned I find myself profoundly soured on the idea that the two communities can ever work together to defuse the disharmony between them. Certainly not for the foreseeable future. Perhaps never.

Jews are certainly not without blame. We have our hotheads and hardheads, Islamophobes and uncompromising irredentists. The difference between us and them, however, is that the majority in our camp, both in America and Israel, have long been willing to compromise.

That is not the case among the majority of Muslims, whose leading mainstream organizations, in the United States as well, insist that all Palestinians living outside the Jewish state's 1948 borders have a right to return to resettle in Israel. That's a recipe for Israel's demographic eradication and they know it.

The more time I spend with Muslims, the more I must conclude that, as a group, their worldview and that of most Jews are in such profound conflict as to render real dialogue virtually meaningless at this time. This is most true for Muslims from Middle East nations. But it extends as well to Muslims from south and east Asia, from elsewhere, and for African-American Muslims.

That's because a prime tenet of Islam is the uumah, the notion that there is an essential unity among all believers, regardless of where they live, and that it transcends nationality, race and ethnicity. Religious solidarity comes first. Islam is the primary social identity. This helps explain why American Caucasian converts to Islam with no direct link to Middle East tensions tend to adopt anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish attitudes.

There is no dialogue today; there is only contentious debate. Certainly, great differences divided Jews and Muslims prior to 9/11. But the events of that day, and of the years since, up to and including the Hezbollah-Israel conflict, have only deepened the mistrust and anger between us and them.

Jews are equated with Israel, Israel is equated with the United States; the absurdly mismanaged war in Iraq and the global conflict against "terrorism" are conflated in Muslim minds. Somehow, Jews — described in the Qur'an, Islam's scriptural text, as the "descendants of apes and pigs" — are deemed to stand behind it all, to have instigated a war against all of Islam that America is perceived to be fighting on behalf of Zionism; the Jews.

The question of Israel is no longer one of conflicting national narratives standing in the way of compromise. Islamists — those Muslims whose politics flow directly from their theology — have made this a religious war.

This Muslim animosity has gone beyond anti-Zionism. Anti-Semitism festers within the Muslim community like no other. For Islamists, the fight against Israel has become part of what the writer Yossi Klein Halevi calls the "theology of genocide." Jews must be eliminated solely because they are Jews. To call this Islamofascism, as President George W. Bush has done, is to underscore the ideology's extremist religious core.

The charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, states the conflict's religious nature in no uncertain terms: "…The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up."

This religious anti-Semitism may be seen in America as well.

At a pro-Hezbollah August rally in Washington sponsored by leading American Muslim activist groups, the crowd, extolling Hezbollah's leader, chanted: "Nasrallah, Nasrallah; the martyr is the beloved of Allah; the Zionists are the enemy of Allah." Across the continent in San Francisco, at another pro-Hezbollah demonstration that same day, participants carried signs reading: "Nazi kikes out of Lebanon."

Osama bin Laden paid little lip service to Israel and the Palestinian cause prior to 9/11. His main beef then was against "crusader" troops — meaning the American military — stationed in Saudi Arabia — and Washington's propping up of the corrupt monarchy in Riyadh. Sure, he mentioned lands once ruled by Muslims lost to non-Muslim rule as being an affront to Muslim pride. But it was Andalusia — the Arab term for Spain when it was under Muslim rule — that he lamented over.

Only later did he add the Palestinian cause to his list of grievances against the West. What better way to rally Muslims made nervous by his audacious attack to his side? In doing so, he made war against Israel in the name of Islam, jihad, a top priority. Today, Iran, a nation in which Islamist ideology holds sway and that appears hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, competes with Al Qaeda for the honor of murdering Jews.

In 1999, Salam al-Marayati, the Iraqi-born executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council, was bounced from a Clinton-era White House anti-terrorism panel after Jewish groups claimed he was sympathetic to terrorists; he had justified Palestinian attacks by saying Israel's "brutal occupation" was the root cause of the violence.

Mr. al-Marayati, one of America's leading Muslim political activists, was someone I met through my connection with New Horizons. I had come, I thought, to know him well, and had even edited some of his earliest opinion columns written for U.S. newspapers that urged understanding and acceptance of the American Muslim community.

In response to his dismissal from the terrorism panel, I published an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week and elsewhere arguing that it was preposterous for Jews to expect Arab- or Muslim-Americans to espouse a pro-Israel line and still retain the respect of their community. American Jews, I wrote, were better off building bridges to up-and-coming Arab and Muslim activists. Help Muslims gain a political toehold in America and they will not soon forget the favor, I said.

I would never write that column today, certainly not after Mr. al-Marayati suggested immediately after 9/11 that Israel was behind the attack in an effort to turn America against the Arab world. If anything, today I'd weigh in against helping Muslims navigate the American political system.

Yet despite all I've said here, I continue to second guess myself. I fear being blinded by anger. I mourn the loss of compassion for dead children no matter whom their parents were. I question whether I have adopted simplistic and even bigoted thinking.

Or worse, that I might stereotype all Muslims as ordinary Germans came to stereotype Jews, and in doing so lose all touch with my reason and humanity.

Is it an accident that 9/11 coincides with the Jewish calendar's most intense period? From Tisha b'Av, when we mourn the multitude of Jewish tragedies, we move to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to repentance and forgiveness for ourselves and for others. What timing!

Stripped of all theology, Judaism for me comes down to a simple article of faith: What is today need not be tomorrow; the possibility of a better day is always there. This is the messianic principle at its most basic, a heartfelt prayer of hope that the process is indeed intelligently designed.

Five years after the Twin Towers crashed and the Pentagon burned, I struggle to remember this simple formula in the face of building evidence that a better day may be a long way off. It gets harder by the day.

Original source: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0906/911_reality_check.php3

Al-Jazeera Airs 'Previously Unshown' Bin Laden Tape

Video Shows Bin Laden Meeting 9/11 Hijackers

CAIRO, Egypt — Al-Jazeera aired on Thursday what it called previously unshown footage in which Al Qaeda chief Usama bin Laden is seen meeting with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The station did not say how it obtained the video, which was produced by As-Sahab, Al Qaeda's media branch.

The video showed bin Laden sitting with his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings.

Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody, and this week U.S. President George W. Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.

In the video, Bin Laden was wearing a dark robe and white head gear walking outdoors in a mountainous area. He smiled as he received several of what the tape said was several of the Sept. 11 hijackers.