If you own a computer and hadn't heard the name "Wafa Sultan" prior to last February, you were bound to have become familiar with it since then. A record eight million hits and counting have been charted on a six-minute video clip - originally subtitled and circulated on the Web by the Middle East Media Research Institute - in which Sultan, a Syrian-born, Los Angeles-based pundit (trained as a psychiatrist) slams Al Jazeera host Faisal al-Qasim and guest Ibrahim Al-Khouli about the ills of Islam.
Wafa Sultan.
Photo: Brenda Gazar
That Sultan is an Arab woman telling off her male challengers on this particular network is only part of the reason her appearance is so startling.
More sensational is the fact that the outspoken 49-year-old is herself a Sunni Muslim. Well, she was born and raised as one, at any rate. And, unlike many of her sympathizers, she does not hold with the opinion that Islam was "hijacked" by extremists. On the contrary, she says, serious research into the holy texts led to her own personal rejection of the religion. The faith, she says, cannot be reformed, but rather has to be "transformed."
Anyone hearing the keynote address she gave earlier this month at the conference "Women in the Middle East - the Beacon of Change" (held in Washington by the American Enterprise Institute) would have been hard pressed to disagree with her assessment. Not that the other panelists - myself excepted - had anything rosy to report on the treatment of their countries' female population.
In fact, the only "disagreement" among the participants, who hailed from Egypt, Tunis, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Sultan, from Syria, was the extent to which women could and would ever be able to enjoy freedom under Islamic regimes. Otherwise, consensus had it that women's and human rights violations throughout the Arab world are so egregious that if change doesn't come from within - and pressure isn't applied from without - then the world is in for a lot worse than 9/11.
If the blood-chilling tales Sultan and others recounted of abuse against girls and women in the name of Muhammed and Allah are true, there is indeed much cause for alarm.
Sultan began her speech with the description of an honor killing that took place in the Palestinian Authority in 2003: "'Tonight you die,' Suad told her daughter, before wrapping a bag tightly around her head. Next she sliced her daughter's wrist... ignoring her daughter's muffled pleas, 'No, Mother, No.' After her daughter went limp, Suad struck her in the head with a stick. The killing of her child took 20 minutes. Suad told a visitor through a stream of tears, 'She killed me before I killed her. This was the only way to protect my family's honor.' ...This poor teenager's sin was being raped by her two older brothers."
Sultan continued with another story, this one from Saudi Arabia in 2002: "The religious police stopped school girls from leaving a blazing building because they weren't wearing correct Islamic dress... Young lives were forced to perish barbarically...
"Once we realize the cruelty of an ideology that can harden the heart of a mother, or can consider young lives as expendable, we will be able to find remedies for liberating the women of the Middle East, where countries in different degrees are ruled by the Islamic Sharia."
The passion Sultan displayed during her diatribe was peculiarly uplifting, in spite of its horrifying content. Speaking privately with the married mother of three - whose English is fluent but heavily accented - one could see how such an apparent contradiction-in-terms was possible.
In an hour-long interview the day after the conference, Sultan was as cheerful and optimistic in person as she seemed like an angry dynamo from the podium. The contrast in her personas was striking - a metaphor, perhaps, of the two vastly different lives she has led.
She grew up as a religious girl in Banyias ("a small town on the Mediterranean"), attended medical school in Aleppo, and now lives as a secular American in California, where she settled in 1989, eight months after her husband, and two years before her two elder children (her youngest was born in the US).
Was it dangerous for your children to remain behind, given who you are?
Not at all. At that time nobody knew who I was. I wasn't Wafa Sultan, the one you're interviewing today. I was a totally different kind of person.
If you were "a totally different kind of person," what made you want to move to the United States?
I was looking for a better life - freedom to express myself - because I was born a writer. All my teachers said so. But anyway, I secretly underwent a change before coming to America.
Did you and your husband undergo this change together?
Yes. We met in 1975, at university in Aleppo, when I was in medical school and he was studying agriculture. It was against our culture for a man and a woman to have an unchaperoned relationship, so we had to conduct our friendship in secret - which we did for four or five years prior to our marriage. Being away from my family made this relative freedom possible.
But 1979 was the real turning point of our lives. It was the year I witnessed the murder of a professor of mine. While shooting him, the killers were screaming "Allahu Akbar [God is great]!"
I was in a state of shock. The sound of the bullets became associated in my mind with Allah.
Why was your professor targeted?
For no reason other than belonging to the Allawi sect of Islam - that of the president - while the majority in Syria were Sunnis. And at that time, there was a bloody conflict between the government and the Muslim Brotherhood. But I knew for a fact that he was not involved in politics. I was devastated, and began to question what kind of Allah this is.
Until then, were you and your family devout Muslims?
Oh yes. I had to fast, I had to preach about Islam...
What altered that?
After the trauma of the murder in the name of Allah, I delved into all the Islamic texts - the Koran and the Hadith - carefully studying each, one by one.
