Wafa Sultan: "first cracks in the walls of our prison"

Dr. Wafa Sultan [وفاء سلطان], an ex-Muslim who now proclaims herself a humanist, was interviewed on Danish television recently (via Little Green Footballs):


Dr. Sultan became notorious in the West earlier this year when she appeared on Al-Jazeera and debated Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, a lecturer at Al-Azhar University in Cairo (for background, see here).

Her message in the above interview was directed at non-Muslims rather than at Muslims, and it urged non-Muslims not to be afraid to question or to challenge Islam. She strongly emphasized that constant and vehement criticism by non-Muslims will pressure Muslims into examining their religion, and is needed to help Muslims improve and transform it.

One of the main problems that an ex-Muslim faces when trying to explain her rejection of Islam to Muslims is that she is often immediately dismissed as a lackey of the West, someone who has sold out her own religion and culture and is playing right into the hands of Western imperialists. This is one of the major differences between Islam today and Christianity at the time of the Protestant Reformation. Protestants – and later, atheists, secularists, and humanists – may have been accused of many things, but generally they did not also carry the stigma of being associated with an outside political enemy who is perceived to have the intention of weakening Christianity in order to facilitate foreign imperialism over Christian countries. (The exception, and it is a major one, is Communism. For example, American Christians reacted to this atheistic ideology by having the words "under God" added to the Pledge of Allegiance.) So an ex-Muslim like Wafa Sultan will have an extremely hard time reaching the typical Muslim in the Islamic world with her message.

(For a discussion of the same problem facing reformist Muslims, see this post "The Reformist Dilemma & Neo-Imperialism" at Eteraz [اعتراض]; see also this post at Winds of Change.)

南無阿彌陀佛