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The Call
Wafa Sultan and her husband, David, were jolted awake by the sound of a ringing telephone. It was just before dawn on a summer morning in 2005, and Wafa couldn't help feeling nervous as she hurried to take the call. Two of their three children had moved to a nearby suburb of Los Angeles to attend college. Were they okay?A voice on the line identified himself as working for Al Jazeera television, the Arabic-language network based in Qatar which, in ten years, had become the most influential news channel in the Middle East. The producer explained that based on some pieces she had written on Islam and terrorism for his obscure Arabic-language website, a friend of Wafa's had suggested her as a guest on one of the network's programs.
Wafa was stunned. She was not a professional writer, much less a scholar on the Middle East. Though she had grown up in Syria, she had called California home for 16 years, and her days were now completely devoted to her family.
Then again, she did have strong opinions about Islamic extremism, and she was utterly unafraid to express them. So if Al Jazeera wanted to talk to a wife and mother in Los Angeles about this important subject, sure, why not? Wafa accepted. What no one could have guessed was that she was about to become a controversial new voice in the Islamic world -- and for many moderate Muslims, a model of courage.
Wafa Sultan grew up in Baniyas, Syria, a town on the Mediterranean where her father was a local grain trader. Surrounded by protective brothers, she studied hard and rarely stepped outside the bounds of Muslim propriety. But in 1979, as a medical student at Syria's University of Aleppo, she witnessed a crime that changed her forever.
One day, Wafa sat in a lecture hall with 200 other students, listening to her professor of ophthalmology, Yusef Al Yusef. Suddenly she heard the crack of gunfire and then saw her teacher crumple to the floor. A group of men stood next to the body, guns extended, shouting, "God is great! God is great!" in Arabic. The killers, Muslim extremists, quickly ran out, leaving the students staring at their dead instructor.
Deeply troubled by this fundamentalist violence, Wafa was further shaken when she became a doctor in a large hospital. Newly married to an engineering professor, she came home from work with disturbing stories of treating victims of domestic abuse. Women would walk in with black eyes, bruised backs, broken bones. Wafa could mend their wounds and listen to their complaints, but she couldn't discuss openly what she saw as the root cause: a culture that demands total deference to men, amplified by extremist beliefs.
Wafa and her husband, David, began to whisper about leaving Syria in order to escape the growing poverty and religious radicalization around them.
"Talking about finding a new home was our daily bread," says Wafa. It took a decade, but in 1988 David finally got an American visa, flew to California and sent for his family several months later.
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