CRIF’s Executive Board and its commission “Women in the City, Transmission and Education”, hosted Waffa Sultan, an American psychologist and psychiatrist of Syrian origin.
Born into a traditional Muslim family on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, Waffa Sultan was steeped in anti-Semitic stereotypes throughout her youth.
Her life was turned upside down in 1979 when, as a medical student, she witnessed the murder of her professor by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. From that day, Waffa Sultan determined to fight Islamism. In 1989, she expatriated with her family to the United States, to finish her medical studies. There she hosted a website seeking to reform Islam called Al Naqued, which means criticism. In February 2006 her participation in a show on Al Jazeera, the TV channel watched by 15 million viewers in the West, brought her to the forefront of the fight against religious fanaticism. The very next day, she was targeted by three fatwas (one in Syria, one in Egypt and one in Saudi Arabia).
Her Internet website exists to show the populations in Arab Muslim countries that the freedom to choose one’s culture is a right.
In a few weeks time, Waffa Sultan will be publishing an autobiography that seeks to reveal the Arab Muslim world to the people in the West.
The President of CRIF paid tribute to “the fight of this courageous woman”.
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