CLASH: Wafa Sultan (Part7/7)

Part 7: Thanks, but No Thanks

Sultan may indeed turn the Muslim world upside down if demagogically-inspired protests like we saw in the recent Danish Cartoon Affair are ignited, but her discourse will land nowhere. Her ignorant, outsider perspective as a former Muslim and now apostate, coupled with her confrontational style will not contribute to the advance of the Islamic World, but will only advance her own career, book sales, and celebrity in the West. She told the Times, “I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings…Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs." Oh, those poor Muslims need us to liberate them (sounds familiar), and Mrs. Sultan is the woman of the hour.

The MEMRI clip shows Sultan, a minute after voluntarily and quite dramatically declaring, “I am not a Muslim,” telling her fellow Al-Jazeera guest, a cleric, that her beliefs are “personal matters that do not concern you.” But yet she flaunts her beliefs to claim that she is at once a “fellow Muslim” seeking reform, and a “secular human being” whose rationality transcends the backwardness of religiosity. Her beliefs are not personal at all; she has made them a public issue and revels in her enlightenment compared to the unfree Muslims clinging to "wrong beliefs." She demands that everyone listen to her diatribe against Islamic beliefs and respect her beliefs, while at the same time insisting to the Times that the Muslims are enslaved by beliefs that are simply "wrong." From this confused starting point, she cannot enrich the debate within Islam, or between the Western and Islamic worlds. She does not offer a logical point of departure for any kind of reasonable, respectful debate.

The Muslim World will ultimately change from within, on its own terms and according to its own timetable. There is certainly a long list of problems that could and should be improved, ranging from human rights to women’s rights, from governance to education and economic modernization. I don't dispute that at all - no society is perfect, and at the present time serious, existential debates might be needed. Muslims should debate controversial topics as well as negotiate the tricky balance between religion and state in a way that best suits them (kudos to al-Jazeera for even entertaining the misguided Mrs. Sultan, for the sake of debate). Violent extremism, which represents few Muslims but has hijacked the Western perception of the entire civilization, needs to be confronted.

But the main issues facing the Islamic World are issues of societal performance that are not wholly determined by Islamic culture or theology. Culture may play some role, just as Max Weber argued that Western European economic progress was driven by the Protestant Work Ethic. But culture is not deterministic. Today, we see productive, modern societies that are Protestant and Catholic, Confucian and Islamic. Muslims should improve their situation in the world, just like anyone else. But the Muslim World doesn’t need the New York Times, Fox News, or Condoleezza Rice to tell them how and what to reform, just as America doesn’t need Muslim talking heads to tell it how to reform health care, address inner city poverty, consume and borrow less (of everything, especially oil), achieve racial harmony, or restore social institutions like the family. The Muslim World certainly does not need the condescending, know-it-all Mrs. Wafa Sultan, recent psychology graduate and former Muslim, to tell it what to do, how to change, and whom to emulate. She will not stimulate debate and progress, but rather stoke resentment and cause offence in the Muslim World.

It’s like the mother who tells her child to clean up his dirty room. The child may recognize the mess and may even want to clean it up, but as soon as the mother commands it, he will resist the whole idea. But mothers are mothers, and they usually get their way because they are bound to their children by authority, but also by love, nurture, and of course biology. Muslims largely recognize their own mess. They may blame too much of it on the West, and not enough on themselves. The West sees this same mess, and blames too much of it on Muslims and even on the faith of Islam itself, rather than taking stock of its own past and present contributions to the mess. But in the case of Wafa Sultan, former Muslim not bound by faith, compassion, or even rational argument to her Muslim audience, the Muslim World should simply turn to her and say, “Mrs. Sultan, you’re not my mother.”

CLASH: Wafa Sultan (Part 6/7)

Part 6: Celebrity Apostate

There are many Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Hindus who once believed in the religion of their parents, but gave up those beliefs to become non-practicing, agnostic, atheist, or converts to other faiths. This happens every day. Mrs. Sultan’s status as a former Muslim is not unique by any means. In LA, Iranian former Muslims are as common as BMWs. And that status, by itself, shouldn’t qualify Sultan as a great social critic, philosopher or contributor to the debate about the “Muslim Problem.” Her opinions and ideas do not earn her any special respectability based on their intrinsic quality. Many Western observers repeatedly charge that the world of Islam is backward, violent, reactionary, unintellectual, unfree, oppressed, undemocratic, unenlightened. There’s nothing new here! What is new is that these charges were pronounced, in Arabic, by a former Muslim who is now an atheist. That may make the comments more intriguing from a publicity point of view, but they certainly don’t add any intellectual weight to the discussion.

Western observers love the Sultan story because Sultan’s message of condescending finger-wagging toward Islam is familiar and comfortable “truthiness.” It’s reassuring for Westerners to think to themselves, “Hey, it’s not just us that think you Muslims are backward, barbaric, and need reform. Look at this Wafa lady (whom I had never heard of until 3 weeks ago). She’s ONE OF YOU, who is saying the SAME THING about you guys. Don’t you see how RIGHT we are?” The New York Times, MEMRI, et al. tell us that Sultan is a courageous hero, a force to be reckoned with and admired. She is famous for criticizing Islam as an ostensible insider, just as Paris Hilton is famous for being an ostensible celebrity.

You’ll see more Western newspapers, networks, and commentators celebrating Sultan. I guarantee it - just watch. The media will position her as an influential INSIDER, one of THEM (and a free-thinking, educated woman no less – and we just know that most of those poor Muslim women are illiterate and locked up at home), who has bravely come forward and repeated the trite Western sound bites about the need to reform Islam and the Muslim World. To the West, Sultan is one of THEM that talks like one of US. She’s a convert to the widely held “truthiness” that constitutes the Western (mis)perception of the Muslim world.

The West regards Muslims with suspicion, but loves “self-hating” and former Muslims. Americans and Europeans will take every opportunity to toast Muslims who have supposedly seen the light and repudiated the Muslims beliefs, culture, and civilizational heritage that have been holding them back from reason and enlightenment. The apostates are upheld as brave champions because they challenge the Muslim World, live in fear and danger of extremist attack, and neatly match the Western pre-disposed views about the backwardness and barbarity of Islam and its followers. Sultan is just the latest celebrity apostate (again, I’m using the Oxford Dictionary definition) in a line of former Muslims like Salman Rushdie and Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen (who has won 21 international awards for her secular humanity and courage against the barbarous Muslim hordes). The New York Times publishes a front page, Saturday Profile on Mrs. Sultan, the MEMRI video is speading like wildfire, and non-Muslims are heaping on the praise about her courage, rationality, and oratory skills. The American Jewish Council has already rushed out Mrs. Sultan’s invitation to a conference in Israel, where presumably Mrs. Sultan, the Syrian-American psychologist, can lecture the Jewish audience about what’s wrong with Islam.

Sultan adds some bravado of her own: she is working on a book that will, she claims in the Times, “turn the Islamic world upside down.” Just think, three weeks ago, this recently graduated, LA-based psychologist (who has not even completed her residency), who to my knowledge has not published a word in English, and who doesn’t appear to have any formal qualifications in history, Islamic theology, jurisprudence, political science, or philosophy, will turn the Muslim World upside down. Such is the intellectual force of her contribution!

CLASH: Wafa Sultan (Part 5/7)

Part 5: Are Muslims Just Whiners?

Maybe Sultan thinks that Muslims are just a bunch of whiners, or that the Muslim sense of victimhood and self-pity is exaggerated. But maybe it’s because several Muslim populations are living under foreign, non-Muslim military occupation, whereas Muslim militaries are not occupying non-Muslim populations. It’s just a fact. I agree that Muslims shouldn’t cop out and blame all their numerous problems on the Evil Other, but it’s equally unfair to dismiss opposition to military occupation, as in Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, or Chechnya, as “crying and yelling.” Isn’t the crying and yelling, in the absence of economic or military power, understandable? Are Palestinians supposed to cheer when watching their homes bulldozed and olive groves decimated, or when their movements are curtailed by Israeli security checkpoints? Even President Bush commented that he could understand the Iraqi resistance, saying “If I were being occupied, I wouldn’t like it either.” Whining and yelling is a human response to injustice, not just a Muslim response.

Mrs. Sultan might have more credibility if she read about the history of Palestine, regardless of “whose” history she reads (generally, victors write history, which is why Palestinians are often frustrated that their tragedy is a footnote of history). To say that the Jewish people have achieved their status in the world solely through their scholarship and work belies 50 years of violent struggle in Palestine. Jewish terrorism / freedom fighting in Palestine is well documented in the years preceding the creation of Israel in 1948. The Irgun and Stern Gang carried out bombings and assassinations from 1931 to 1948 to unseat the British from Palestine and forcefully suppress Arab rebellions against Jewish settlement and immigration. These groups were also implicated in the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin , but their commanders were not punished. Instead, these commanders - Begin and Shamir - eventually became Prime Ministers of Israel.

The Jewish State, which officially claims to represent all Jews everywhere (including the diaspora), was not created and expanded by books and journal articles, but by forced settlement, guns, tanks, and fighter jets. No one in Israel would deny that the survival and territorial expansion of Israel is no small part due to its military prowess. And I don’t know of any military conflict without death, destruction, and victims on all sides. Even today’s illegal construction of Jewish settlements and the Separation Wall (euphemistically called the Security Fence) in the Occupied Territories are possible due to Israeli military superiority over Palestinians, not due to Jewish “work and scholarship.” Israeli soldiers patrolling the West Bank are not writing poetry and doing science experiments on their tours of duty. They are there to maintain order, control the Palestinian population, and help to achieve Israel’s political, territorial, and demographic objectives. It is not the Muslims who need to wake up to this reality – Palestinians are living in these conditions every day. It is their reality. It is Mrs. Sultan who needs to awaken to the uncomfortable facts on the ground.

CLASH: Wafa Sultan (Part 4/7)

Part 4: Muslim Monopoly on Badness?

Digging into Sultan’s comments on the MEMRI clip, there are more curious statements. She appears to quote ahadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and the Quran freely, but does not quote them properly by attributing the source of the hadith (which usually goes: according to such and such compiler of hadiths, so-and-so once heard the prophet, peace be upon him, say: xyz) or which parts of the Quran she is quoting. I don’t know whether what she was supposedly “quoting” was out of context or even remotely accurate, and since it’s an edited clip, we don’t know the reaction of the Muslim scholars, or if they corrected her quotations. Further, she claims that the Muslims “invented” the clash of civilizations because in their history and theology they differentiate between themselves and non-Muslims (whether they call them non-believers, People of the Book, pagans, Protected People or whatever). This is hardly new – most religious communities identify themselves in contradistinction to the “other”, e.g. Jews and Gentiles. How does this mean that Muslims “started” the Clash of Civilizations?

Elsewhere in the MEMRI clip, Sultan claims that “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." Further, she reprimands the supposed Muslim instinct to burn down churches, destroy embassies, and blow things up, contrasting it with Jews once again: “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.” There’s Colbert’s truthiness again. But the argument is hollow.

First, Jews did not resort to terror tactics or attacks against Germans after the War because better avenues were available to obtain some sense of justice (however imperfect) for German atrocities. There was a process whereby the key architects responsible for war crimes and the Holocaust were brought to justice. The Nuremberg tribunal was established in 1945 for this purpose, and rightfully imprisoned or convicted 22 of 24 defendants. Adolf Eichmann, a war criminal who escaped justice at Nuremberg was apprehended in Argentina, tried, and executed in Israel in 1961-62. The German government had paid the State of Israel and Holocaust survivors over EUR 55 billion in reparations by 2000, according to the German Foreign Ministry. Collective Western guilt over the Holocaust probably catalyzed the creation of a Jewish State, which is why Israel was born in 1948, not 1938. There have been many publications and films documenting and commemorating the Holocaust, and there is undoubtedly value in coming to terms with this outrageous monstrosity by ‘crying and yelling’ through the medium of film, documentary, and publishing, or erecting museums and memorials. Human suffering, not least the Holocaust, is always worth crying about.

Furthermore, the idea that extremist Muslims are the only killers, bombers, and arsonists out there is quite incorrect. Extremist Muslims do not have a monopoly on the use of violence. We have seen many arson attacks against mosques in Europe (UK, Holland, France) and the U.S., but these events are not widely covered or condemned in the West. Just do a Google search for “mosque arson attack” if you are curious. In 1969, an Australian Christian severely damaged the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third holiest shrine in Islam. We have also seen Jews violate mosques. In 1994, blow up the King Fahd Mosque in Los Angeles (Sultan’s hometown – doesn’t she read the local papers?) and the offices of Arab-American Congressman Darrell Issa. The leader of the JDL committed suicide as a result, and his co-conspirator was sentenced to 20 years in jail for this plot (). In the Occupied Territories, the Palestinian Authority claims many mosques and churches have been violated, damaged, bombed, or bulldozed by the Israeli military.

It’s simply factually wrong for Sultan to condemn Muslim “badness” while extolling Jewish or Western virtue. There’s plenty of badness to go around, and violent extremists on all sides. Just look at Iraq: over 2,300 American soldiers have been killed since the American invasion, along with the often ignored 30,000-90,000 Iraqi deaths, most of whom are civilian (source: ). Americans, Sunnis, Shi’is – no group is without blood or blame. But the original cause of this chaos, the American-led invasion, is now seen as an elective war based on hyped (and now demonstrably false) WMD claims and an impending threat to Western security. Whether killers are Shi’a, Sunni, Christian or Jewish, there’s plenty of badness to go around, both historically and in the present.

Sultan’s depiction of crazed, violent Muslims as the cause of all that is wrong in the world, while Jewish and Western civilizations contribute to humanity with science and scholarship, is a plainly misleading juxtaposition. And, I might add, it’s an intellectual outrage to single out acts of Islamic extremism while totally ignoring non-Muslim acts of violence. Iraq comes to mind, where the U.S. military invasion has directly or indirectly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, mostly Iraqi civilians. Organized, military violence still kills people. Victims in Iraq and the West Bank are just as dead as victims of Hamas suicide bombings. Firebombed mosques in Europe and bulldozed homes in Palestine are just no less destroyed than the ransacked Danish and Norwegian embassies in Beirut and Damascus. Violence equals violence. Badness equals badness. The means and justifications are different, but the outcome is the same. There’s plenty of Evil to go around.

CLASH: Wafa Sultan (Part 3/7)

Part 3: Insider or Outsider?

What did Sultan say? The New York Times wrote that she had “a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims” (my italics) quoting her as saying, “I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book” (my italics). The paper went on to add, she “no longer practiced Islam,” implying somehow she was some kind of so-called moderate, liberal Muslim not weighed down by archaic practices and rituals.

I found this all very confusing, because in the MEMRI clip she very clearly said, “I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. I am a secular human being. I do not believe in the supernatural, but I respect others' right to believe in it.” So, she defined herself as a non-Muslim, and in fact a person without belief in God (we can safely assume that God qualifies as a supernatural being).

On the one hand, Mrs. Sultan claims the rational superiority of someone who is “a secular human being”, liberated by rational thought and above religions and the supernatural. On the other hand, Mrs. Sultan wants the association with “fellow Muslims” and “our holy book” because she wishes to appear in the West as someone who is critical of Islam from the INSIDE. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sultan’s sleight of hand doesn’t work for me. She cannot claim she is non-Muslim and deny the most basic religious tenet – belief in God – yet claim the Quran is somehow “our holy book” she shares with her “fellow Muslims.” She cannot be both INSIDER and OUTSIDER. On the MEMRI clip she is the outsider lecturing the Muslim clerics about the barbarity of Islamic civilization. To the New York Times, she is the reasonable, non-practicing Muslim who wants to re-examine “our holy book” and help her “fellow Muslims.” It’s totally inconsistent.

To me, Sultan is a person who was raised in Islam but has given up not only the practice but the faith itself. She says herself she is not a Muslim, and there is certainly no such thing as an Atheist Muslim. A Muslim is someone who believes, and by the definition of the word in Arabic, submits to the Will of God. An Atheist denies the existence of God. Based on her own proclamation, Mrs. Sultan is a secular (secular human being) atheist (doesn’t believe in a supernatural being) who was formerly a Muslim. By definition, then, she is an Apostate. I am not using this label as some kind of epithet or juridical opinion, but rather in the way the term is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “Apostate: noun, a person who renounces a belief or principle.” Her tone is arrogant and dismissive, and possibly offensive to many Muslims. In the video-clip she says to a Muslim cleric on the show, “Brother, you can believe in stones, as long as you don't throw them at me. You are free to worship whoever you want, but other people's beliefs are not your concern, whether they believe that the Messiah is God, son of Mary, or that Satan is God, son of Mary. Let people have their beliefs.” It sounds catchy, but makes no sense. Telling a Muslim cleric he can believe in stones or that Satan is God if he wants to might be quite offensive to the cleric, because it dismisses his monotheistic, Islamic belief and equates it with the Arabian polytheism and idolatry which it replaced, or even stranger, a hypothetical religion that might hold Satan as God, Son of Mary. Last time I checked, stone worship and Satanism were not major religions. Islam has over a billion adherents. I would have appreciated a more congruent analogy and some modicum of respect for a major belief system. Mrs. Sultan has not only renounced Islam, but may have also forgotten good manners and logical argument. She does not offer a reasoned, fact-based discourse.

CLASH: Wafa Sultan (Part 2/7)

Part 2: MEMRI Problems

I must say I was intrigued when I first read about Mrs. Sultan, and wanted to approach the uproar with an open mind. I watched the so-called Al-Jazeera debate that is the source of the great stir surrounding Mrs. Sultan (please watch the clip here first, in case you haven’t already). Only I didn’t watch it on Al-Jazeera. The viral video clip is an edited version, translated and hosted by MEMRI, the very official-sounding Middle East Media Research Institute. That is the clip being posted on YouTube and elsewhere, which Western audiences are celebrating. The clip starts and ends abruptly, and seems more like a monologue of Mrs. Sultan than a “debate” of any kind. Her debate opponents barely said a word, except for one cleric calling her a heretic who blasphemed the Quran and the Prophet, and that there was no point rebuking her. This comment was included at the editorial discretion of MEMRI – we have no idea how the debate or discussion actually unfolded from beginning to end.

MEMRI’s involvement in disseminating Sultan’s heroics gave me some pause. I went to MEMRI’s site and couldn’t find any information about the people behind MEMRI or even how to contact the organization. Maybe that’s because it is already widely known that the organization which claims to offer unbiased translations of Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi media appears to have a distinct pro-Israel agenda. The founder of MEMRI is a former Israeli colonel, Yigal Carmon, with over 22 years experience in military intelligence. In 2002, Brian Whittaker of The Guardian authored an article entitled “Selective MEMRI” – raising doubts as to the objectivity and apolitical claims of MEMRI. You can read that very informed article here, and form your own opinions. Anyway, the upshot of MEMRI’s involvement is a MEMRI-translated, abridged, and edited clip where Mrs. Sultan is the star, talking down the Islamic establishment who have nothing to say in response other than silence and some dismissive “heretic” labeling.

What surprised me about Mrs. Sultan’s MEMRI monologue is the anger and volume of her tone. If you closed your eyes you would think she were addressing The Million Man March, not a TV camera in a small studio. Her tone is not one of discussion, but rather of rehearsed, calculated public oratory. You don’t see these long-winded, high-decibel monologues on Larry King, for example. What I perceived as nothing other than a comprehensive rant covered Islamic civilization, the Prophet Muhammad, the Quran, war and peace, Islam vs. the West, the successes of the Jewish people compared to the failure of Muslims, her personal beliefs and a whole lot more in just a few minutes. It was an impressive coverage of topics in a short amount of time. Some of her comments had the ring of truth for many (or “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert would say), but upon closer examination, many problems arise.

CLASH: Wafa Sultan Affair (Part 1/7)

Part 1: Wafa Sultan Makes Waves

If you haven’t yet heard of Wafa Sultan, you’re in good company. Nobody really had until a few weeks ago. But today she is on the cover of the New York Times, a new celebrity in the Clash of Civilizations. Until recently, Wafa Sultan was an unknown, 47-year old mother and newly qualified psychologist quietly living in the LA area. She was distinguished only by her lack of distinction. She wrote some articles on an equally undistinguished blog, The Critic (al-Naqed), which seems to be largely a recycler of Daniel Pipes articles (that’s a whole other story). Then her passionate, angry appearance on Al-Jazeera on Feb 21, “confronting” Islamic clerics brought her into the international spotlight. The Times called her an “an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.” The story is interesting because it’s a prism through which many of the issues surrounding the so-called Clash of Civilizations can be dissected. Because I am too lazy to condense my thoughts into small bite-sized chunks normally associated with blogs, I am analyzing the Wafa Sultan brouhaha in several parts.