A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam

by Wafa Sultan

  When I was in fourth grade in primary school, Syria received aid from the UN food aid agency that included trucks of Nestlé’s powdered milk manufactured in the United States. One of the conditions attached to this aid would appear to have been that the milk had to be distributed free to primary schoolchildren since, if this condition was not attached, Syrian offi-cials would sell the trucks of milk and pocket the money as usual. The milk began to be distributed to us schoolchildren at an average rate of one glass per pupil per day, which we had to drink before the end of that school day. I remember our teacher telling us at every lesson, “Can you imagine what’s happening here? America donates milk to Syrian children to fool the world into believing it’s generous, but to Israeli children it donates tanks!” Most of us did not drink the milk; instead we poured it out on the unpaved earth of the playground.

  Today I can find no explanation for our refusal to drink the American milk other than a psychological repugnance for the United States and its milk as a result of the venom that our teachers had poured into our tender minds. Why do we inject our children with this poison? That is the question that has confronted me ever since I began to discover the truth in my new society. When I scream at the top of my voice, “Stop injecting this poison!” I am doing so not just to protect Jews and Christians. I am doing it above all to protect the children of my homeland and save them from being burned by the acid of hatred that scorched my generation.

  I can still clearly remember our religious education teacher’s repeating to us sayings and stories of the Prophet Muhammad that deal with Jews and Christians, and I can recall the effect these anecdotes had on our consciences and mental well-being. The story most deeply etched in my memory is the one that relates how Muhammad and a group of his followers heard a far-off sound. The prophet’s followers asked him: “What’s that noise, Oh Prophet of God?” and he replied: “That’s the Jews suffering torment in their graves” (Sahih Bukhari, 1286).

  In another hadith Muhammad says: “An imposter will come along and claim to be the messiah, and seventy thousand Jews will follow him, each girt with a sword. But then the messiah will catch him, kill him, and defeat all the Jews. Each and every stone and tree will say: ‘Oh servant of Allah, Oh Muslim, here is a Jew, come and kill him.’ “ The only exception is the salt tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews, and if they hide behind it, it will not reveal their presence. Today there are Muslims who like to spread the rumor that Jews in Israel know the truth of this hadith and have begun to plant salt trees to hide behind.

  Whenever Muhammad wanted to stop his followers from doing something, he would say: “God has cursed the Jews because they did that.” He said, for example: “God cursed the Jews because they took the graves of their prophets as a place for prayer” (Sahih Muslim, 823). A man asked one day: “Oh Prophet of God, I have a slave girl whom I desire and to whom I wish to do what a man does, but, for fear she may become pregnant, I ejaculate outside her body. But I have heard that ejaculating outside a woman is considered tantamount to murder of the fetus—is that true?”

  He replied in a hadith: “May God curse the Jews, as they said that! Pay no attention to them, and ejaculate where you will. If God wished her to become pregnant you would not be able to ejaculate outside her body.” If education is responsible for shaping the human mind, then the entire mind is the product of education. What sort of mind can teachings such as these produce?

  Is not the Muslim the natural product of his education?

  12.

  Clash of Civilizations

  THE SEPTEMBER 11TH terrorist attacks shocked me, but they did not surprise me. Day and night, I had been expecting something of the kind. I had been expecting it because of my involvement with what was being written in the Arabic-language newspapers here and what was being said at our social get-togethers. In the Arab world, there is no such thing as a secret, and everything that is about to happen in the future is preceded by signs and portents in the present. But many people cannot read the signs, for one of two reasons: either conceit or ignorance. American government officials prior to September 11th were conceited and ignorant enough to disregard them.

  A traditional Arab folktale tells the story of a man who was riding through the desert when another traveler, who had lost his way, signaled to him to stop and pick him up. Experience had taught the desert Arabs to beware of highwaymen. Nonetheless, the horseman took pity on the wayfarer and stopped to pick him up. After a short time had passed the wayfarer said to the horseman, “What a fine horse you have, my friend.” A little later the wayfarer said again, “This is indeed a fine horse, my friend.” After an additional period of time had elapsed, the wayfarer said, “By God, this really is a fine horse we have here!”

  The horseman pulled up at once and told the wayfarer, “Get off my horse or I’ll kill you! At first you said what a fine horse ‘you have,’ then you called it ‘this horse,’ and now you said what a fine horse ‘we have.’ In another minute you’ll be calling it ‘my horse,’ and kicking me off its back!” Americans do not have enough experience of highway robbers and so they allow any passing wayfarer to violate the sanctity of their horses! They are not expert at either debate or trickery. They say what they mean and they mean what they say, and have no idea that they are dealing with people skilled in saying what they don’t mean and meaning what they have never said.

  Laws alone cannot safeguard a society. For a law to be effective, there must be a moral foundation in the populace, and a nation has to attain a certain moral standard before it can either make laws or apply them. It is a society’s morals that formulate its laws and guarantee their enforcement. Interpersonal relationships within a society are complex, and the laws that govern that society may not be able to deal with every individual case. Only morality can do that. When I moved from a still primitive society to a civilized one I was impressed by the enormous difference between the two. It was then I began to search, as I still do today, for the reasons behind these differences.

  I emerged from my search utterly convinced that what we are experiencing in Muslim societies is not a crisis of government, revenue, resources, or even law: It is a moral crisis. Our Muslim societies are governed by a religious law that imposes itself by force and relies on fear as a means of perpetuating and protecting itself. Islam, as I have already emphasized, was born in an arid and desolate environment where people had to struggle to survive. It adopted the customs of that environment and that era, absorbed them, and then refused to allow them to change with the times.

  Culture encompasses religion and adapts it to suit the times. American culture was influenced by Christianity and Judaism—and, indeed, it still is—but it changes nonetheless in accordance with the times, and religion changes with it. It is culture that shapes religion, not the other way around. As soon as religion begins to interfere in people’s lives and take them over, it loses its spirituality and reveals its inability to keep up with people’s constantly changing needs. Muslim clergymen confront us on the television screen and talk about Islam’s attitudes to menstruation, the advantages of banks, the Pakistani nuclear bomb, and tsunamis, all in the same breath.

  Islam subjugated the cultures of all the peoples it afflicted, but it eradicated all traces of indigenous Arab culture more thoroughly than those of any other. This culture no longer possesses any of its original distinguishing features; over the course of fourteen centuries, it is Muslim law that has delineated its characteristics. A Christian born and brought up in Jordan is more Islamic in his behavior and way of thinking than a Pakistani Muslim. Islam, as I said before, damaged the cultures of all the Muslim peoples, but, since the Koran was written in Arabic and its translation into any other language is forbidden, Islam was unable totally to blot out the characteristics of other cultures in quite the same way it erased Arab culture.

  Non-Arab Muslim peoples have managed to preserve the remnants of their cultures and protect them from Islamization. These remnants, sparse and meager th
ough they may be, distinguished these nations from the Arab peoples, who, as they were more profoundly influenced by Islam, were much more seriously damaged. This was the situation from the inception of Islam until thirty years ago, i.e., until the Saudi Wahhabi octopus, with its terrorist ideology and its funding, infiltrated these nations and the non-Arab Muslim nations of their cultures, such as Indonesia.

  Islam is a legal code that was created in an era when a mentality of raiding and booty held sway, and, as a result, its pivotal issues are raiding and spoils. It was unable to construct any common foundation of morality; rather, it dealt a death blow to all the finer moral qualities of the pre-Islamic Arabs.

  Antara al-Absi, one of the most famous of the pre-Islamic Arab poets, boasted in a self-glorifying poem in which he enumerates his own virtues, that he considered the most important of these to be his “abstinence from spoils.” His era was followed by the Islamic period, which adopted a culture that canonized raiding and incursions and put its prophet Muhammad and God in the same category as far as division of the spoils was concerned, allocating them a one fifth share between them.

  Whatever strictures it might contain, this legal code could not escape the limitations of this mentality. Men killed others so as not to be killed themselves, and robbed so as not to die of starvation. Muhammad was a warrior rather than a thinker. He left no moral legacy for his followers to build upon or use as a basis for the societies they founded. Nor did he leave them room outside the boundaries of this law in which they might have exercised their freedom and perhaps, responding to the demands of time, have invented a moral code of their own.

  The most important traditions written and handed down about Muhammad concern his raids and what happened in the course of them. All his teachings stem from the realities of the world he lived in and are the indisputable product of it.

  If you read the biography of the Prophet from beginning to end you will find no trace of any kind of moral authority. Some people may protest that it has to be read in its historical context. But morals, by definition, do not change with the changing times. Unlike culture, they are not subject to the dictates of time or place, but remain applicable everywhere, at any time. Morals are a common code shared by all peoples of the world at all times in all places. What is moral in Beverly Hills will be considered moral in the tribes of Africa, and vice versa. Culture may vary from nation to nation and country to country, but the moral code is almost identical everywhere at all times.

  The moral code is a set of natural laws that enjoin people to do what is right and avoid what is wrong. When nature drew them up, it equipped people with a rational or instinctive ability to distinguish between right and wrong, so that they could adhere to these laws. Following this code helps the human species to survive in safety.

  Fear, of all the emotions, is one of the most destructive to the human spirit. When people fall victim to fear they lose their ability to tell right from wrong, as their every action is reduced to a reaction to their fear. In the desert environment that gave birth to Islam, human thought and behavior reflected the fears characteristic of life in those surroundings. The fact that people did not feel safe gave rise to all the customs that dominated that time and place, as a reaction to this destructive emotion.

  The great catastrophe came with the advent of Islam, which gave these customs divine sanction and laid a sharp divisive sword between those who accepted them and those who did not. Anyone who openly rejected any one of these Islamic customs was considered an apostate and was punished by death. Islam resorted to the use of fear as a means of controlling its adherents and added to their existing fear of their arid desert environment the fear of the sword, and it was this that deprived Muslims of the ability to tell right from wrong.

  A society in which people lose their ability—rational or instinctive—to distinguish between right and wrong becomes a curse to all humanity. All religions undermined Man’s ability to tell right from wrong when they taught him to fear God’s punishment should he consider rejecting any of their teachings.

  Islam, however, differs from other religions in that it threatens its followers not just with hell but also with death, in order to speed their journey to hell. People are more frightened of death than they are by the idea of being punished by God. Muslims followed Muhammad’s teachings blindly, for fear of feeling the sword at their throat. Muhammad told his followers in a hadith: “Drink camel urine, it contains the cure for all ills.” Muslims can graduate from the most famous medical schools in the world yet still believe that camel urine can cure illness. Their belief does not stem in most cases from scientific conviction but from fear of the deadly sword.

  In fourteen hundred years no Muslim has dared candidly to exercise his ability to distinguish right from wrong and tell his fellow believers: “Don’t drink camel urine!” Primary-school teachers read their pupils the account which relates: “The Prophet Muhammad married the Jewish woman Safia on the day her husband, father and brother were killed,” without engaging in any discussion of the morality or legitimacy of such a marriage. Muslims believe, as an article of faith, that everything that the Prophet Muhammad said and did was inspired by God. Islam does not permit any one of its followers to doubt that these words and deeds are right by the moral standards of all times and places.

  Let me relate a story from Ibn al Athir, an Arab Muslim historian, on the life of Muhammad: “Muhammad, God bless him and grant him salvation, sent five of his men to kill Kaab Bin al-Ashraf who had been lampooning him and inciting the tribe of Quraysh against him. One of the five was Kaab’s brother Abu Naila. Muhammad accompanied them to a place named Baqi’ al-Gharqad then sent them off, saying, ‘Go in the name of God. May God aid them’ and then returned home.

  “When the five men reached Kaab’s camp, Abu Naila called out to him and Kaab jumped up in his blanket and came out, feeling safe because he had heard his brother’s voice. But the men betrayed him and killed him. They took his head and made their way back to Baqi’ al-Gharqad (that is, the place where Muhammad had left them), and said ‘God is great.’ Muhammad, God bless him and grant him salvation, heard them and said, ‘God is great,’ for he knew that they had killed Kaab. When they reached Muhammad, God bless him and grant him salvation, he was at prayer. He told them, ‘You have succeeded honorably,’ and they flung Kaab’s head into his hands.”

  When a Muslim reads this story, no matter how well educated and informed he may be, he finds nothing in it that makes him curious enough to ask: “Where in this story is the mission with which God entrusted his prophet?” When terrorists in Iraq and other Muslim countries behead their hostages without any apparent qualms, the world asks: “Why do they do it?” Muslims who describe themselves as moderates reply: “These terrorists have misunderstood the teachings of Islam.” But I ask: Have they misunderstood the story of how Muhammad’s companions killed Kaab Bin al-Ashraf, then tumbled his head into Muhammad’s hands?

  If Zarqawi has misunderstood what Muhammad has said, as some Muslims claim, has he also misunderstood what he did? Hundreds of stories like the account of Kaab’s murder fill biographies of the prophet, which serve as the main—if not the only—source of learning in the Muslim world. Umm Qirfa was a woman who, most Muslim historians agree, was over a hundred years old when Muhammad’s followers, at his request, because she had written a poem against him, tied her legs to two camels and drove them in opposite directions until she was torn limb from limb. Muslims take pride in this murder, which they regard as an indication of Muhammad’s followers’ loyalty to Islam. This cultural fund of Muhammad’s words and deeds has remained for fourteen centuries the “moral compass” of every Muslim, wherever he may be.

  An Arab proverb says: You can extricate a man who has sunk into a quagmire, but it is impossible to remove a quagmire that has sunk into a man. People in the Islamic world have absorbed the quagmire in its entirety and are experiencing a moral crisis. They badly need to be able to feel guilt for the sins they commit.
Some people may ask: What has Islam to do with this crisis? Islam remains what it has always been: the main, if not the only, source of education in the Muslim world, and people are the product of their education.

  When I delve into the Muslim books that were the main source from which we quenched our thirst for cultural knowledge, I begin to doubt the efficacy of the methods America and the rest of the world are using to combat terrorism. The Americans went to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and announced that they had found none. They found none not because they did not exist, but because the searchers did not know where they were hidden. Had they opened any Muslim book they would have found in it vast quantities of such weapons.

  The danger lies not in the weapons themselves, but in the hand that grasps them. American troops cannot remove this threat that faces all humankind unless the world remains alert and is aware of where in the Islamic world the weapons of mass destruction lie concealed. The schools responsible for creating the terrorist mentality in the Muslim world are more dangerous than any weapons factory on earth. These schools have destroyed people’s minds, and this destruction has a greater effect on their own lives than its does on the lives of others. The terrorist mentality is a barren one, which can produce nothing of any worth, and so it has a greater effect on the lives of those who adopt it than it does on the lives of their enemies.

  No Westerner can fully comprehend the truth of what I have said here, because Westerners do not live in the Muslim world and so find it hard to imagine the extent of the moral disintegration afflicting all aspects of life in these societies. People in these societies have lost their ability to feel guilt for their misdeeds. From their earliest youth they have been brainwashed by teachings that have convinced them that God has created them to be slaves.