Wafa Sultan sözleri

Throughout Muslim history the Alawites were the poorest members of Syrian society. Before the Ottoman occupation of Syria, the overwhelming majority of Alawites lived in Aleppo, the town I lived in as a medical student in the north of the country, near the Turkish border. When the Ottoman forces swept through northern Syria they butchered the Alawites, killing most of them. Those who survived fled

toward the coast, and eventually settled in the mountains between central Syria and the sea. The deep gullies and tortuous winding terrain of that arid mountain region provided a refuge for the scattered remnant of the fleeing Alawites, who hid in its caves.
In their new habitat the Alawites suffered appalling poverty, neglect, and oppression at the hands of both the Ottoman occupiers and

the Sunni majority.

After I had been in the United States for only a few weeks, an Arab neighbor of mine took me to the supermarket in an attempt to familiarize me with the area we lived in. We went into a Vons market and, once there, she began to open every packet she could, then she began to make holes in the lids of cartons of milk, Jell-O, and cream. Then she made holes in a number of bags of potato chips,

packets of paper handkerchiefs, and packets of spaghetti.

I shouted at her disapprovingly: “Dina, what are you doing?”

“May God curse them. They stole our land!”

“And are you doing this to try to get it back?”

“I’m trying to hurt them! You’re still new here. Don’t you know the owner’s Jewish?”

Of all Muhammad’s marriages, however, his marriage to Safia was the most horrific of all. Safia Bint Hayi was a Jewish woman whose husband, father, and brother Muhammad had killed when raiding the Khaybar tribe. She was taken prisoner in the course of the raid by one of Muhammad’s men named Sahm. Muhammad took Safia from him, gave him seven other female prisoners as compensation, and married

Safia the same day he killed her husband, brother, and father. Once again, a woman is given no opportunity to make a decision regarding her marriage or, ultimately, her fate. Safia finds herself in Muhammad’s arms from one day to the next and does not have the right to accept or refuse what he decides to do with her.

MOST MUSLIMS, IF not all of them, will condemn me to death when they read this book. They may not even read it. The title alone may push them to condemn me. That’s how things are with them. They don’t read, or, if they do, they don’t take in what they read. They are much more interested in disagreement than in rapprochement and they are—first and foremost—supremely interested in inducing

fear in others with whom they disagree. They may even threaten to condemn you just for reading this book because, in their cruelty, they have learned something about how to control others: Nothing tortures the human spirit more effectively than making someone a prisoner of her own fears.

I was driving from La Jolla in San Diego to Riverside with my Iraqi friend Amal who had lived in this country for no more than three years. She and her family fled Saddam Hussein’s merciless repression of the Shiites in the south and sought refuge in Saudi Arabia, which did not welcome them. They left after America responded to their request for permission to immigrate.
At the entrance to

the side road we took on our way to her house a homeless man was standing begging from passersby. My Iraqi friend looked at me and said derisively, “Look at that beggar. That’s the America you’re so crazy about!”

(...) I always wish that good Americans could see what I see before it’s too late. Amal was an employee of a famous American company. Once, at a party I was invited

to, I met the head of the department where she worked, a very cultured and refined American lady. In the course of our long conversation we touched on the topic of emigration and the difficulties emigrants faced when moving to a new country, and I was surprised to hear her say: “What I like about Amal is her love for this country, her great admiration for American values, and her gratitude for

what this country has given her.” I nodded my head in agreement, while a silent voice inside me murmured: “You poor Americans! If you only realized what Amal thinks of the United States, you’d realize that you’re digging your own graves with your naïveté!”