According to the New York Times, a new Islamic voice is challenging traditional Muslim teachings. Dr. Wafa Sultan is a Syrian-American psychiatrist who lives near Los Angeles. In late February, she gave an interview on al-Jazeera television further publicizing the views she expressed in an essay she earlier had published on the web site Annaqed.
The Times said that she "bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders whom she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 1400 years. She said the world's Muslims . . . have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence."
She compared Muslims unfavorably to Jews. In response to the Holocaust, she said, the Jews "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. 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 clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or of civilizations. It is a clash 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."
Muslim clerics have dismissed her as a heretic who has blasphemed against Islam, the prophet Muhammad and the Koran. She is receiving death threats by telephone and email.
But what she said makes a lot of sense. Now if an influential, respected-in-the-Islamic-community male Muslim would just say the same things. Maybe then we could make some progress in learning to live with one another.
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