Wafa: West underestimating evil of Islam

Richard Kerbaj August 21, 2007

THE West was still underestimating the evil of Islam, an influential Muslim thinker has warned.

On a two-week "under the radar" visit to Australia, Syrian-born Wafa Sultan secretly met both sides of federal politics and Jewish community leaders, warning them that all Muslims needed to be closely monitored in the West.

She insisted that Australia and the US have been duped into believing there is a difference between the religion's moderate and radical interpretations.

In an interview with The Australian, Dr Sultan -- who shot to recognition last year following an interview on al-Jazeera television in which she attacked Islam and the prophet Mohammed -- said Muslims were "brainwashed" from an early age to believe Western values were evil and that the world would one day come under the control of Sharia law.

The US-based psychiatrist -- who has two fatwas (religious rulings) issued against her to be killed -- warned that Muslims would continue to exploit freedom of speech in the West to spread their "hate" and attack their adopted countries, until the Western mind grasped the magnitude of the Islamic threat ...

Dr Sultan said Islam was a "political ideology" that was wrongly perceived to have a moderate and hardline following.

"That's why the West has to monitor the majority of Muslims because you don't know when they're ready to be activated. Because they share the same basic belief, that's the problem," ...

... the West needed to hold Muslims and their leaders more accountable for the atrocities performed in the name of Islam if they wanted to win the war on terror.

But while she considered the prophet Mohammed "evil" and said the Koran needed to be destroyed because it advocated violence against non-believers, Dr Sultan struggled to articulate her vision for Muslims, whom she said she was trying to liberate from the shackles of their beliefs ...

"Muslims have been hostages of their own belief systems for 1400 years. There is no way we can keep the Koran."

Janet Albrechtsen August 21, 2007

Last year, the Syrian-born psychiatrist, who has lived in the US for almost 20 years, catapulted herself into the centre of the critical issue of our time: how will Islam embrace modernity? She entered the battle of ideas in a fiery debate with an Islamic scholar on Al Jazeera television when she criticised Islam for its backwardness, for shunning knowledge and progress, for propagating a ``mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages’’ ...

She eschews Islam because, she says, it has so little to offer women. She describes Islam as a war against women, perverted by fear of sex and sexuality that mandates the mistreatment of women ...

`I remember hearing as an eight-year-old girl that a woman is nothing but shame. Her marriage will cover up one-tenth of her shame and her grave will cover up the rest of it. Can you imagine, at eight, being consumed by shame just because you are female?’’ she asks ...

Yet Sultan is certain that Islam can reform and will reform if exposed to enough information and if Muslims are able to make choices ...

Her message is clear. The West must be more confident about espousing its own values. And Islam must accept criticism as a sign of intellectual rigour if it is to reform into a belief system that embraces freedom and progress for its followers. Sultan is full of hope that the information revolution has cracked the wall around the Islamic prison. Not just for Muslim women.