L.A. woman ignites Muslim debate

The L.A. Daily News reports:

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.

Today, thanks to a blunt and provocative interview on Al-Jazeera satellite television 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 in-boxes of hundreds of thousands of people around the world, Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders whom she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Quran for 14 centuries. She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably to the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Sultan said the world is 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.

Some people want everyone to belief the same thing.