Jeg havde tænkt på hvordan det gik dr. Sultan efter hendes optræden på al Jazeera, og her er svaret - for dem der ikke har set hende på al Jazeera, så tag et kig på Menri og søg på hendes navn.
En modig kvinde som siger det, der bør siges, og som man kun kan sige mod at blive dræbt eller som minimum truet på livet, det er sådan nogen vi skal støtte, og ikke kuweitiske klerke med slet skjulte trusler i ærmerne.
Læs den, selv dem der ikke er så stive i engelsk!
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sult
an.html?_r=1&ei=5094&oref=slogin
The Saturday Profile
For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
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.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
"I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our
holy book." - DR. WAFA SULTAN
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."
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."
Hendes "tilfælde" viser ihvertfald, at det er farligt at bilde
sig ind, at problemet med islamismen ville forsvinde, hvis blot
vi indførte en "blasfemi-paragraf" for at undgå sådan noget som
Muhammedtegningerne.
Der er tydeligvis tale om, at man ikke vil acceptere *kritik*.
Hendes kritik af især islam, men også religion generelt, er helt
klart meget skarp - men det har den også lov til at være.
Man har lov til at være anti-religiøs. Og at give udtryk for det.
Artiklen kan også ses her:
http://essayus.blogspot.com/2006/03/
muslims-blunt-criticism-of-islam-draws.html
--
Mogens Michaelsen
http://mogmichs.blogspot.com/
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