A God Who Hates

Whenever someone risks their life to warm the world of an impending danger, they deserve our utmost respect and consideration. Men and women like Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Walid Shoebat, Ali Sina, Mosab Hassan Yousef, and now Wafa Sultan inform us on Islam.

Wafa Sultan, in her book A God Who Hates, exposes the degradation and oppression in a culture dominated by Islam. Sultan, a Syrian-born American psychiatrist, presents a penetrating sociological study of Arab society. She picks up where Raphael Patai left off in his classic, The Arab Mind.

The scars of Islamic oppression are deep and difficult to escape. Both Wafa and her husband have struggled to free themselves from the dark bitter worldview that permeates the soul of the Arab culture. This book is a warning to those who believe that nations-building can readily “win hearts and minds.” “Muslims hate their women, and any group who hates their women can’t love anyone else,” she explains in iron clad logic. Why do they hate their women? “Because their God does.” [p7, 128-135]

Islam was founded in a desert culture rooted in raiding and plundering [p66, p174]. Harm and humiliation, if not outright slaughter, were tools to defeat one’s rivals. Islam gave such behavior a moral and religious rationalization. Sultan sees the core ethos at work today in Arab nations. Even Arabs who immigrate to America retain a joy in seeing America humiliated but hide this from English-speaking audience [p59-60].

She painstakingly explains how the authoritarian nature of Islam crushes the spirit of the individual. Every relationship and interaction is defined by who rules and who is submissive. Rather than equals dealing with equals, the master-slave dynamic predominates [p155-164]. This psychology survives even during the heyday of Arab nationalism, when Islam was marginalized.

Arab nations didn’t have secular dictators because we supported them; they had secular dictators because of the inescapable mindset left by Islam. “The United States was accused by Muslims of supporting dictatorships in their countries … and to relinquish their guilt America decided to bring down Saddam Hussein’s throne. … America miscalculated …” [p163] Without a cultural change, without marginalizing Islam, long term prospects are dim.

Sultan’s internal struggle to free herself from the soul-killing hatred of her Islamic homeland gives us an indication of the difficulty of cultural change by those who try to move forward while remaining in an Islamic society. The scars are deep. We are greatly indebted to women like Wafa Sultan. She may not be able to advance the Arab culture but her warning might just save ours.