For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats

A powerful woman, regardless of faith.

And to step up against a community more radical than perhaps any we have ever seen is even more impressive.

She is very admirable for what she is doing, though all it will probably do is convert some and make the others much more radical. She is no doubt the most powerful person with an American mentality, though if she said she still practiced Islam, it would be easier to get the message across.

That was a terrific video and a shame it has taken several years for voices of reason to be heard. The muslim community has been silent while violent motivations have taken over the religion.
Watch the video at memritv . org
Better yet, check out the Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and Iranian videos while you are there. "Death to America" is a popular chant among the followers.

Although I have not even seen her in any television appearance and have only read this article, I greatly admire her for her courage and sensible perseption of her old religion. This is the kind of individual that we need to educate not only the Muslim people but the American people as well on how distorted the religion of Islam has become. Her appearances in Arabic newspapers and websites is an effective way to educate and enlighten Mislims. I hope the American mainstream media will follow lead in setting aside their personal interests and have a conscience to present in their news the problem of what radical Islam is. I admire her bravery to stand for her beliefs in spite of the deadly threats on her and her family. I hope to hear or see her one day in the radio or television. I liked it when she said,

"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."

She is a glimmer of hope in our world of uncertainty. May God bless her and her family.

For some great viewing pleasure, see how Wafa Sultan put herself on the Islamofascists' Most Wanted List.

I, for one, do not buy into the hype. Her tone of voice is agonizing. Her arguments are crude. Her agenda is typical of Western confrontational ideologies. I doubt that she "converts" anyone, and I think such assaults only intensify the anger towards the West. She is "hardly a diplomat", but then again, diplomats are not the ones we vote for these days...

I have seen the video and I believe she is honestly correct in her arguments. Her point is simple that everyone has his /her right to her own beliefs and should learn to respect others convictions. I don't care if her voice may be agonizing, arguments crude. What I care about is she sets personal interests aside, is telling the truth as it is in spite of deaths threats on her. This is generally unseen with our politicians and the news media. Likewise, both speaks passively regarding the war on terror and keep on criticizing the government,especially Bush. In this time, we need people who will stand up for the truth and not afraid of people with the intent to burn, blow themselves up and kill anyone who disagrees with them. We actually don't need politicians and diplomats who are reluctant to use force-whether figurative or literal-when it is necessary. We need individuals who are prepared to sacrifice convenience or even their lives just for the TRUTH!

"May God bless her and her family" WTF!!! Don't you even see it yourself? Don't you ever listen to the sound of your fanaticism? God died around 1890, but his ghost is still haunting us. I prefer the Cheshire Cat myself. I do not like ghosts, especially not the holey variety.

I admire her very much, but as Claus Jacobsen points out, her argument would come across much better if she approached this from the standpoint of a Muslim and not from that of a person who has rejected her religion completely. There is no reason for believing Muslims to pay attention to her.

What I mean to say is, I am a Muslim. I drink alcohol, I don't pray five times a day, and I don't believe that Quran is the literal word of God. But that doesn't mean I'm not a Muslim. I am trying my hardest to work with other progressive muslims to change our religion from the inside, to remind people of the great triumphs that came from Muslims in the Islamic Golden Age, to say to Muslims exactly what Dr. Sultan herself says: "The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them." I want Muslims and non-Muslims alike to know that our religion teaches peace and love and not hate, death, destruction. Like any religion it can be distorted to provide a justification for barbaric acts; or it can be interpreted in a liberal and open way. Personally, I find it far more effective to call myself a Muslim and to fight the insane radical ideology that has been poisoning my faith. I think Dr. Sultan's approach, to condemn the entire faith wholesale, probably does less good than harm.

Notice the story isn't her position on violence and Islam, but the threats against her.

It seems Western media points to these people offering modern visions of Islam, then goes on to say how moderate Muslims are not confronting radicalism in their midst. I don't get it.

Shouldn't we first be discussing how virtually none of our leaders are confronting possible perversions of our legal system? Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and lax policies regarding torture are just as hypocritical as violent activity by Muslims.

@ upright ape:

I think the threats against her are unacceptable responses. But I do think wisdom applies. It is possible to argue with Muslims without telling them they are backwards, barbaric societies, from the Middle Ages, etc. I have done so myself - I admit that this is a claim that is difficult for me to prove in this forum - with good results, from a position of diplomacy and a strong foundation in democracy and human rights (I have been a former group leader of Amnesty International).

If I was to launch myself, like Dr. Wafa Sultan does at the Muslims, on the notoriously racially bigoted society in which i live (Denmark), I would receive a number of death threats. I have been threatened by racist skinheads and by ordinary citizens several times merely for walking in the streets with a Danish girlfriend, or for driving the subway. I have been physically assaulted more than once, and I cannot count the times I have been verbally abused in public, because I was born in Korea.

I have learned to take another approach than labelling the entire society as racist or discriminating, even as I believe it is not entirely corrupted by these attitudes.

Please notice that this is an interview on Al Jazeera, which in itself proves that there is a considerable amount of freedom of speech in some Middle Eastern countries. Visiting the Al Jazeera website you will find that even if the media is "directed" towards the general Muslim population, Western views are presented as well, namely in the lively discussion fora.

Her comments were immensely powerful, and while I don't agree with some of the things she mentioned, I for one am definitely going to buy her upcoming book and recommend it to others at work (bookstore).

I dont have the slightest clue as to why Dr. Wafa Sultan calls herself a muslm. however though her points may seem strong, it's never questioned whether she herself is right and or if the muslims are right. she's just another gear in a war of propoganda. i'm not pointing fingers or anything, but its common sense and right value that'll show who's right. She thinks to title her thoughts as '..when God is a monster' when she is trying to correct those billions who live for the sake of God. i seriously would like to debate this woman but not in intention to correct her for she left islam but it is in my best intrest that she doesnt' foul the minds of others. look at what zawahiri says about today: "In France a Muslim father cannot prevent his daughter from having sex because she is protected by the law, but this same law punishes her if she covers her hair...", this is why muslims fight, they want what is right in their value, and his opinion isn't even considered, even though the only reason he corresponds with bbc is to tell the west what he feels should be done, otherwise he wouldn't care so much, he cares for what is happening to islam in a world where islam is tuned out and even (contradictly) is named barbaric when it hates those who make a buisness out of pornography. This modernization that she porclaims as the goal of all, is whats barbaric. But of course many come to say that he's just another fanatic, don't listen to him, fight for freedom...the USA has the most freedom in the World, fight for your America. The fact is is that America has the most prisons in the world. America lets loose its youth to watch media that makes its younsters into gangrivals with eachother and worship the value of money and pleasure. People come to ask, "why are the muslims going crazy, why are they terrorist?", their simply not. let me explain that people say that muslims spread by the sword, and they should be condemed for it. but what is your history text book teaching you, what are those political figures teaching you? There should be libraries dedicated to what muslims have done, but there aren't, simply because others come to hate them (who knows why). The muslims have spread by the sword defensively (that last word is mysteriouly left out). And the westerners spread by the cannon rather offensively, to nonmuslims and muslims alike. what happened to the flourishing muslim communities of Africa and India. when the europeans came to colonize? they just stepped in and said 'we'll let you live if you let us do the ruling" (sure they said "rule" instead of "live" but its the same thing). The Africans were cannoned and the indians were drugged and cannoned. And these are muslims. They're different, but there united, their muslims. The Europeans have overblown the ballon and those peace loving fanatics are now kinda mad, thats almost all. And yes these fanatics are reactionary, they want to get rid of a nation that really doesn't let them have their freedom, and thats not to kill, but to kill those who are enemy (and don't say all that 9/11 stuff because if you do, you just buying your governments malarky) There's so much i'd like to say, but what happens to one when they voice a correct opinion? Their government takes care of them. (i'll be posting this elsewhere also).

Real said: The fact is is that America has the most prisons in the world. America lets loose its youth to watch media that makes its younsters into gangrivals with eachother and worship the value of money and pleasure. People come to ask, "why are the muslims going crazy, why are they terrorist?", their simply not. let me explain that people say that muslims spread by the sword, and they should be condemed for it. but what is your history text book teaching you, what are those political figures teaching you? There should be libraries dedicated to what muslims have done, but there aren't, simply because others come to hate them (who knows why).

I think this is 4 steps short of being a Muslim reactionary apologist. You state that there are no libraries dedicated to what Muslims have done. Well, I strongly disagree with the factual basis of this statement.

As for your whole post, reactionary Muslims are the reason why radical Islam has spread so quickly and so rapidly. Reactionaries do nothing to stop it. Fly planes into buildings? Hey, the Jew-lovers had it coming. You think what the government tells us is malarchy? The idea that our government is somehow less morally in the right than the governments that behead infidels, stone teenage girls, and cut the fingers off of thieves....that's a whole bunch of malarchy. The Muslim world lets this happen, and you wonder why the Muslim world is in turn shunned by the West. Simply put, we're about 500 years ahead of the Muslim world in almost every fashion. They embrace the ways of the old, and try to force that on everyone. "Respect us," they demand. Respecting them has turned into accepting their lackadasikal approach to Islamofacism. Start controlling the anti-semitism, start controlling the terrorists, and start controlling their arrogant and self-righteous clerics. Then we may actually take the Muslim world seriously.

@ Real:

I for one welcome you and look forward to reading your posts. The portrayal of the Islamic world in the West needs not to be countered by Islamic demonizing of our civilization, since we make a great effort of this ourselves. The criticism for "decadence" is, in fact, the pinnacle of non-Western criticism of "Westernization", which I never tire to point out. This point is raised, not only by Muslims, but by people all over the world who are concerned about pornography, prostitution, promiscuity, suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, lack of elder care, lack of respect for authorities, gang violence, youth crime, "happy slapping", racist violence, divorce rates, and a large number of "social diseases" attributed to modernity. Modernity needs to take a good look at itself, as it points its finger at the rest of the world.

(I will also be posting something similar elsewhere)

The simple fact is, though her debating style was crude, she was able to present her arguments in a clear manner -- and completely, too. It might not convert the muslim world, but it shows that a woman can speak her mind in a free society. That is why some are saying that she is very dangerous to fundamentalist Islam.

I will buy her book if only to see what else whe has in mind. So what if she is no longer a Muslim? That doesnt make her arguments any less valid. Feminists find, lose, and rediscover religion all the time. Philosophers generally prefer reason over religion. And most scientists are often godless. And I still read their books.

(sorry if that looks like a text book)

let me first correct myself by saying that i meant libraries of Islamic base that were destroyed, specifically the (non-muslim) emperor, Genghis Khan who set fire to a library that was immensely huge for its time and today's time, and what gives is that this library was only dedicated to the first 7 sentence chapter of the holy Quran. Now there are libraries of Islamic History and Culture, but these are ones of dust, and heck, I can't come to name a double digits worth of them.

what the malarkey really is is that the person who finds that freedom is actual. Its really quite hard to explain to another why freedom isn't actual, because the freedom of someone is something of pleasure. You can have freedom but that would be purposeless. Now one may come to say, "whats the point of life w/o pleasure?". That question is the question of someone who doesn't know. What i'm trying to exemplify is that Religion is the power that should control society. If you may analyze, Islam is the only religion that gives an entire rule of every point of life. No matter how harsh it is (i'll explain harshness later on). Now if you look back at the bourgeoisie and liberals of past centuries, they were really deniers of progress, they denied all the past knowledge of those people who had built their nation to the great [now] unrecorded history and eons into the past. Back to the rule of society, it is plain logic in Islam that living for pleasure instead of submission is a life that'll go the wrong way. This is a wisdom of the past. Nowadays, those liberals, from who's actions we are still affected, have rid us of the progress of how to rule people. I mean, even non-islamicly, go and look at the people of the Pharaoh, the ancestors of japan, the people of Pompeii, etc. These were people who lived in pleasure. The people of Pompeii had lived in sodomy and had been destroyed. Why? You know the answer, creationist or not, That God did it or they just died in their acts of sodomy and were preserved so that we can simply analyze and blah blah blah. The acts of Divinity is unrecordable to science in a literal sense. Christianity doesn't acknowledge science because it can't embrace it as a creation of God like Islam. Science is a tool to physically acknowledge the miracles and creation of God. And there hasn't been a single contradiction of science and the holy Quran. The worshiping materialists of Science don't acknowledge the Holy Quran simply because its of 'faith'. Don't get me wrong, i love science, but there just so many people who look at it differently.

Society can modernize in terms of technology, economy, society, etc as long as its not in vain (i.e. pleasure or money) THIS is a fact that many will have trouble understanding but is just another lesson in Islam. What these radicals and fanatics want, is a society where people are not going to fall. And if one fights for his pleasure and money he will die in vain. Why? Because your cash and your sex isn't going to comfort you in the grave. As simple as that, but a world of understanding. Every single thing must die-- an undermined rule of biology. And the thing is is that if your going on in life looking for that love or gold you'll die and then you'll understand why that's not what you should've been looking for in life. Those people who a the minority in the world by not being the people of the book are those who are ruling the rest, the majority. Everything I've said is logic. There is an Intelligent Creator who made us and keeps everything going, the deists say that Gods there but he's left everything off like it was a clock, this is obvious. If you believe in God you should know that were nothing to Him and He can easily not care about us. That's what "There is none worthy of Worship except Allah" means. That creation cannot do anything w/o the will of Allah and Allah can do anything and everything w/o the will of creation. Allah is independent and creation is dependant.

What the basic is in this life is that everything you see around you is not a random occurrence. The harmony of stars sailing across the nights sky. If you stick a branch in the ground and outline its shadow, on that same day, a year later, you'll find the same shadow. This solar system to this galaxy to the unknown is all there. Look at the works of Stephen Hawking, didn't he prove that there must've been a sparker to the big bang in the vast nothingness. Aren't the psychological rules of Freud denied, at large, today. Why are evolutionists saying that humans won't evolve anymore because we're not encountering anymore problems, that we're becoming perfect. Excuses?... Why can't student's ask why a 'theory' is being taught to them like a fact? This secular society is not good.

Islam. It teaches submission. That's literally what Islam means. Your going to die...so make a choice, live in this life with pleasure. Or call the bluff of pleasure and simply acknowledge the teachings of God through logic. That's why you live, you have a short test of 60years in average length and compared to the infinite hereafter, its a value of Zero. This life is short, no one can explain perfectly this to another, its all in experience, just like so much else in life. The next life is for pleasure, its rather a common sense. Islam teaches patience.

Allah is how to call god in Islam. The people of the book worship this same God, but apparently the older peoples of the Torah and bible haven't acknowledged the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, as the prophet. The Jews interviewed him after the ascension to Miraj, to see if he was lying. They asked for a description of Jerusalem, and received an accurate one. They saw a splitting of the moon and convinced themselves that it was trickery. The Christians, however accepted Islam as a people of the Book. The King of Abyssinia at the time of the Holy Prophet. And that King of the Christians later accepted Islam, and it wasn't under the sword but by his own will. The Christians of Europe let the Muslims live, and then (its really vague why, the Masons don't really say) the nebacanezzer incident happens, For those who don't know, this was when the crusaders walked there horses through a river of blood, knee high of the each horse, in various Islamic towns. But, you know that's past.

Whats wrong in today's world is that many have the wrongest values. I've already explained. Money, Pleasure and etc will not get you far in life. Allah says that he created us so that we worship him. And Allah says no further, just because its as simple as that. That's the answer to so many philosophical questions. And, in terms of Philosophy, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is wrong. TLP is a narration of the Logical Empiricism of many and is primarily from Ludwig Wittgenstien. He argued that Philosophy is the only logical Clarification of thoughts and therefore it becomes a study of language. That's partially true. It does become a study of language but only because its the verbification of thought. Thought is logically universal, therefore it should stay as clarifying thoughts for the sake of life, purpose, etc. But that deep philosophy will make this post too large.

All in all, Dr. Wafa is just a speaker with a clever tongue and a sharp wit with the some extensive knowledge. But that all doesn't matter because she has the wrong values, and is too immersed in her own brilliance of words and clever remarks with a passion for something that she gave up trying to understand. It was probably the way woman are seen to be treated in Islam. Well, again, its modern propaganda that makes it look bad to cover ones wife. Remember this is a life of submission, and the burqa is a physical way of submission, and that's pretty much all, otherwise that woman have alot of freedom in this world. And those few accounts of middle eastern woman who say ignorant things again, is, as I've said, modern propaganda. The woman in Islam has alot of freedom. Now one may ask, "then, why can't your woman work independently?". Its not cause Islam doesn't care about what they want, Islam cares for what this woman's natural duties are. If she goes out and works, the father may be able to take care of the children, but the father doesn't have milk in his breast's. Its not humorous when you see troubled youngsters in the US who are depressed at the most liveliest age of a human. Its a natural agreement in a family that the male who is naturally more capable will go get income for the family and the mother will take care of the members of the Family, because this is what the differences in gender allows, physically, mentally and quite spiritually. Its all past knowledge.

And it goes on and on, but these questions have to be answered. These are the questions that drove uncountable amounts of humans to a point in humanity where everyday, so many people will die for these questions. Human kind is in a Dark Age again because of this plague of ignorance. And when Islam rises up to straighten things out, its rejected, simply because its not understood. May we all try to understand each other before going into War. May Allah Accept.

Thanks for the lecture. I'm going to go out and purchase a prostitute.

Really, I udnerstand your need to rebut her statements, but was all of that really necessary? I feel like I just got sent into Sunday School again.

lol, that was a pretty quite read for you Mack. But the reply isn't only towards her. I'll be back on tmrw, its work time for me.

@real:

Yeah, I was already logged on anyway and saw the update right when it went up. I know you put a lot of time into it, so I didn't want it to look like we're no longer with you. But my immediate reaction is above: I don't think it's quite specific enough for the scope of the issue. Yes, we all know there are many different philosophical approaches to life, but it seems this is just one more.

@mack

yea well the lady's writing a book, so its okay if i write a chapter it an okay response i guess. i just find that she's just another fool.