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March 20, 2006

'Light of Sultan' Coming From Wrong Messenger

There Is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century - Wafa Sultan

Wafa Sultan is an Arab American psychiatrist living in Los Angeles. She appeared on Al Jazeera 2 weeks ago to debate a professor at Al Azhar university, the world's main Sunni Islam school. On February 28, we posted on Wafa Sultan's destruction of attempts by her interviewer to shift the blame from rioting Muslims to a Western scholar (Samuel Huntington and his thesis), and the circular commentary of the imam (who avoids debate by resorting to name-calling), all on MEMRI TV (Video here). Over a million people downloaded the Al Jazeera program.

Wafa Sultan's comments were unusual in that she was being interviewed on Al Jazeera, an Islamist (fundamentalist) propaganda channel.

However, at the time of my post I couldn't help but wonder if she was the right person to be attempting to shed some light of reason to the Islamist audience of Al Jazeera, and apparently I wasn't the only one. The Big Pharoah, as a Muslim living in the region, is a better gauge of Muslim receptiveness to Sultan's comments than the New York Times and non-Muslim Wafa Sultan enthusiasts.

(...) I am not so excited about Sultan and I believe she and others who share her line of thought are very counterproductive to our region.

(...) It was apparent from the interview that Wafa Sultan has stopped being a Muslim for reasons that she alone can tell. This fact alone will discourage even the most moderate Muslims from listening to her.
(...) ... don't expect Muslims nowadays to heed the call of a former Muslim ...

(...) ... I believe the Sultan vs the Al Azhar professor debate was an attempt by Al Jazeera to discredit anyone who thinks differently about Islam. By putting these 2 together, Al Jazeera was forcing its viewers to choose between Sultan and the professor 99.9999% of viewers had no option but to side with their fellow Muslim, the professor.

(...) We don't need former Muslims, we don't need atheists, we don't need lesbians, what we need are reform minded Muslim thinkers. Only these people have the necessary legitimacy to pull us from the dark abyss we're in now.

If The Big Pharoah is even close to reality in his gauging of the reception on the Muslim street to the comments of Sultan and other similar speakers, and I'm inclined to agree with him, then we need to find out how to identify those "reform minded Muslim thinkers", learn how to convince them to speak out often and forcefully, and identify how best to help them effectively communicate their message to the Muslim street.

For that we are going to need some help from our "reform minded" and "reform thinking" Muslim friends. So how do we go about getting this ball rolling?

Posted by Richard at March 20, 2006 2:27 PM