An ex-Muslim psychiatrist is attacked for apostasy.
That kind of position raises skepticism among tolerant Americans, even—or especially—secular ones. Those of us who subscribe to no religion tend to see them all as similarly irrational. Sure, Islam is full of bizarre and oppressive dictums, but aren't the Bhagavad Gita and the Torah, not to mention the Bible? And didn't Christianity manage to move beyond the Inquisition and the Crusades, suggesting hope that Islam can move beyond its most violent and attention-getting extremists? Moreover, Islam has within it reformers and scholars, peace-seekers and feminists. Why decry the religion as a whole?
This has a direct bearing on the kinds of governments that end up existing in modern Muslim societies, Sultan argues. Western geopolitical strategists tend to define Baathist Syria as secular, as they did Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The point of that argument back in 2003 was to suggest that Hussein was unlikely to ally with religious fundamentalists like al-Qaida. On a purely political level this was probably true; Hafez al-Assad, the current Syrian dictator's father, really did crush the Muslim Brotherhood. But Sultan suggests that the very reason dictatorship—secular or otherwise—can prevail in a place like Syria is Islam. In a telephone interview she said, "I believe that dictatorship in our Islamic countries is the product of Islamic teaching. I believe that Mohammed was a dictator."
Somehow, though, this more benign description of Sultan's commute to work captured just as much about the place she lived: "It was nerve-racking and exhausting to be in any public place any day of the week, if you were a woman." Sultan's observation of Aleppo in the late 1970s is an accurate description of most Muslim Arab big cities today—and a good many other places. Which brings us to the weakness of her argument. This is an absorbing book, full of Dickensian details like her habit of plucking Lebanese newspapers from the trash as a little girl just so she could read. Ultimately, though, it blames Islam for sexism and many other ills, often in sweeping terms. This leaves us with no explanation for the systematic human-on-human horrors inflicted elsewhere in the world. In Sultan's view, humans created the Muslim version of god, but that god is now so powerful that once he gets his clutches into a person or a society he is nearly impossible to escape. I'm more optimistic: If humans created him, they can change him too.
The fear is here. For trying to explain its logic, Sultan now has to bow to it too.