(Sunday Times-UK) Christopher Goodwin - Dr. Wafa Sultan, who was brought up as a Muslim in Syria, denounced the teachings and practice of Islam as "barbaric" and "medieval" on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network. Sultan was previously known only to a few for her writings on www.annaqed.com ("The Critic"), an Arab-American website. In 1979, when she was a student at university, she witnessed armed members of the Muslim Brotherhood shoot one of her teachers. "They filled his body with bullets as they shouted 'Allahu akbar! (God is great)'." She says they killed him even though he had nothing to do with politics. "This was the turning point of my life." She began to reread the Koran closely, gradually coming to the conclusion that the violence and oppression of most Muslim governments and some of those fighting against them stemmed directly from the teachings of Islam. She noticed that "there are too many verses in the Koran which say you must kill those who are non-Muslim; you must kill those who don't believe in Allah and his messenger. I started to ask: is this right? Is this human? All our problems in the Islamic world, I strongly believe, are the natural outcome of these teachings. Go open any book in any class in any school in any Islamic country and read it. You will see what kind of teachings we have: Islam tells its followers that every non-Muslim is your enemy."
2006-03-23 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive