- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Saint Martin's Press Inc. (2 Dec 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312538359
- ISBN-13: 978-0312538354
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.9 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
287,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Festivals > Eid
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
From the front page of "The New York Times" to You Tube, Dr Wafa Sultan has become a force radical Islam has to reckon with. For the first time, she tells her story and what she learned, first-hand, about radical Islam in "A God Who Hates", a passionate memoir by an outspoken Arabic woman that is also a cautionary tale for the West. She grew up in Syria in a culture ruled by a god who hates women. 'How can such a culture be anything but barbarous?', Sultan asks. 'It can't', she concludes 'because any culture that hates its women can't love anything else'. She believes that the god who hates is waging a battle between modernity and barbarism, not a battle between religions. She also knows that it's a battle radical Islam will lose. Condemned by some and praised by others for speaking out, Sultan wants everyone to understand the danger posed by "A God Who Hates".
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
86 of 95 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a brilliant psychopathological analysis of Islam and is essential reading. I can but give you a taste. Apologists for Islam frequently argue that if there is a problem it lies with individual Muslims and that it is they who need to change - not Islam itself. Wafa Sultan will have no truck with this nor with the idea of `radical' Islam, which is a Western distinction. She points her accusatory finger very firmly at the Koran and the hatred that pours out of its pages.
Saddam Hussein committed genocide against Shias and Kurds, though they were fellow Muslims, and yet, `Not a single Sunni clergyman has expressed any regret over what that criminal did to his country' (p.230). Why? Muslims are commanded by the Koran to obey their rulers - even bad rulers. The Kurds and Shias disobeyed Saddam. In disobeying him they disobeyed Allah. Consequently Saddam `... committed no crime under Muslim religious law'(p.160).
Just as reprehensible is the personal example of Mohammed, who is the role model for all Muslim men. The author gives many examples of his excesses. Here's a taste. On one occasion he decapitated 800 Jews with his own hands. After beheading the husband, brother and father of Safia in her presence, he took her to bed and made her his wife that very night. When he was fifty he married the six year old Aisha and consummated his union with her when she was nine.
Given Mohammed's sexual appetite and example, it is not surprising that, in modern Syria, Wafa Sultan's eleven year old niece should have been given in marriage to a man in his forties. It is only to be expected that such marriages are a commonplace in Arab countries and that not infrequently they should end in tragedy. After several attempts to escape her marriage, her niece finally committed suicide.
In beheading Western hostages in Iraq, the late al-Zarqawi, was simply following the example of Mohammed in killing the enemies of Allah. This is a shocking and revealing book whose message non-Muslims cannot afford to ignore.
Saddam Hussein committed genocide against Shias and Kurds, though they were fellow Muslims, and yet, `Not a single Sunni clergyman has expressed any regret over what that criminal did to his country' (p.230). Why? Muslims are commanded by the Koran to obey their rulers - even bad rulers. The Kurds and Shias disobeyed Saddam. In disobeying him they disobeyed Allah. Consequently Saddam `... committed no crime under Muslim religious law'(p.160).
Just as reprehensible is the personal example of Mohammed, who is the role model for all Muslim men. The author gives many examples of his excesses. Here's a taste. On one occasion he decapitated 800 Jews with his own hands. After beheading the husband, brother and father of Safia in her presence, he took her to bed and made her his wife that very night. When he was fifty he married the six year old Aisha and consummated his union with her when she was nine.
Given Mohammed's sexual appetite and example, it is not surprising that, in modern Syria, Wafa Sultan's eleven year old niece should have been given in marriage to a man in his forties. It is only to be expected that such marriages are a commonplace in Arab countries and that not infrequently they should end in tragedy. After several attempts to escape her marriage, her niece finally committed suicide.
In beheading Western hostages in Iraq, the late al-Zarqawi, was simply following the example of Mohammed in killing the enemies of Allah. This is a shocking and revealing book whose message non-Muslims cannot afford to ignore.
44 of 51 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I don't know if anyone else has a girlfriend who states they are 'muslim' yet rejects what she sees as the misrepresented Islam practised by males all over the muslim world (and the West too). It is painfully heartbreaking trying to explain why Muhammad and his religion is a terrible role model for children to learn, and that muslims behave in an uncivillised manner only when they try to emulate their prophet.
Books that go through the Koran line by line or analyse Muhammads life can cause a muslim mind to go into defensive shutdown, blindly rejecting any of the vital information from the mind of someone who otherwise would reject Muhammads teachings due the simple matter of them being so terrible. However this book, by contrast, tells the life story of Wafa Sultan from her own perspective, a far more difficult voice to dismiss since she is both female and resident in an Islamic country for the first quarter century or more of her life. Her psychological analysis of the muslim mindset may well resonate with other muslim women in a way that a Western critique of Muhammads words and actions could never do, although his teachings and examples of behaviour are also discussed in this book as necesssary examples of how muslims program themselves and their children with Muhammads barbaric teachings and then act surprised when their laws permit men to beat their wives for disobedience.
No one book can help a muslim reject Muhammad's teachings all at once, but books like this may sow enough seeds of doubt to one day blossom into clarity about the danger of Islam to impressionable young children who grow up seeing women as inferiors who should obey men as commanded by Muhammad's conveniently invisible bully-monster Allah.
Books that go through the Koran line by line or analyse Muhammads life can cause a muslim mind to go into defensive shutdown, blindly rejecting any of the vital information from the mind of someone who otherwise would reject Muhammads teachings due the simple matter of them being so terrible. However this book, by contrast, tells the life story of Wafa Sultan from her own perspective, a far more difficult voice to dismiss since she is both female and resident in an Islamic country for the first quarter century or more of her life. Her psychological analysis of the muslim mindset may well resonate with other muslim women in a way that a Western critique of Muhammads words and actions could never do, although his teachings and examples of behaviour are also discussed in this book as necesssary examples of how muslims program themselves and their children with Muhammads barbaric teachings and then act surprised when their laws permit men to beat their wives for disobedience.
No one book can help a muslim reject Muhammad's teachings all at once, but books like this may sow enough seeds of doubt to one day blossom into clarity about the danger of Islam to impressionable young children who grow up seeing women as inferiors who should obey men as commanded by Muhammad's conveniently invisible bully-monster Allah.
47 of 55 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Wafa Sultan is renowned for her taboo shattering interview on Al Jazeera, when she skewered a poor Muslim cleric with a long overdue diatribe on the faults and blindnesses of Islam. This book is a piece with that mission. It is searingly honest, largely autobiographical and brims with horrific experiences derived from her family and medical practice in Syria, and with the now well described duplicity of many Arab-speaking acquaintances in the West. It is peppered with ascerbic analysis for this behaviour, the naive Western response and valuable insights into the Middle Eastern mind. The role of honour, the difficulty of apologising, saving face, the state of the conscience are among some of the crucial themes she touches on.
Her description of the Arab and Muslim neurosis (if not psychosis) about Israel is especially illuminating, and reveals just how poisoned and distorted much Middle Eastern political and journalistic discourse has become. Detractors should learn to read Arabic or read accurate translations of publications to find ample confirmation for what she claims, if anything she understates it.
She doesn't adequately explain why the West is so cowed by Islamic morality, and given her history, understandably doesn't have a clear sense of just how deeply Western morality has decayed, why for example the rocketing teenage pregnancies, STDs, broken families and feral children that Muslims clerics so often harp upon are indeed hallmarks of dangerous lawlessness in Western society. Muslims have a point when they speak with disdain of Western 'values', but Wafa Sultan's rejoinder would no doubt be that much of that 'morality' is also hollow and deeply hypocritical, and may act as a shield for disgusting abuse, as evidenced by her numerous accounts.
The book however makes tentative positive recommendations and serves as a salty, prophetic wake up call that both Muslims and other faiths would do well to read carefully and critically.
Her description of the Arab and Muslim neurosis (if not psychosis) about Israel is especially illuminating, and reveals just how poisoned and distorted much Middle Eastern political and journalistic discourse has become. Detractors should learn to read Arabic or read accurate translations of publications to find ample confirmation for what she claims, if anything she understates it.
She doesn't adequately explain why the West is so cowed by Islamic morality, and given her history, understandably doesn't have a clear sense of just how deeply Western morality has decayed, why for example the rocketing teenage pregnancies, STDs, broken families and feral children that Muslims clerics so often harp upon are indeed hallmarks of dangerous lawlessness in Western society. Muslims have a point when they speak with disdain of Western 'values', but Wafa Sultan's rejoinder would no doubt be that much of that 'morality' is also hollow and deeply hypocritical, and may act as a shield for disgusting abuse, as evidenced by her numerous accounts.
The book however makes tentative positive recommendations and serves as a salty, prophetic wake up call that both Muslims and other faiths would do well to read carefully and critically.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Eye opening
One of the reviewers here states that non-Muslims should read this book; being a Christian and not a Muslim myself, I have read this book and it is an eye-opener, if not completely... Read more
Published 2 months ago by T. S. Hughes
Not what I expected
First of all after studying Islam as a Westerner I have come to the conclusion it is not a radical or violent religion and people feel it is so due to a minority of Muslims and... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Asma
Needs a pinch of salt
Great read. Devoured it in the space of a couple of hours. Towards the end though, I began to get that feeling you get when your friend is telling you how bad her Ex was and how... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Justaguy
Shocking Truth
Essential reading for anyone wanting to learn of Islam as it is actually experienced, particularly by women, in the Muslim world.
Published 23 months ago by C. W. Stammers
The TRUTH at last!
Wafa Sultan, the Syrian psychiatrist who escaped to the USA from a traditional Muslim culture, writes with real courage and insight. Read more
Published 24 months ago by G. Blech
Goes to the heart of sensitive problems
This short and easily read book provides a riveting account of core problems in the Islamic world, with particular focus on the situation for women. Read more
Published on 24 April 2010 by Henrik Ręder Clausen
Autobiography and psycho-spiritual & political study
Wafa Sultan provides a valuable addition to the body of literature that reveals life in Moslem societies, in her case the seemingly secular state of Syria. Read more
Published on 28 Mar 2010 by Pieter
Should have been a great read but....
....it's a little depressing. I'm pretty sure not all Muslims are as bad as Wafa Sultan makes out, but the book is a damning exposes of Muslim's institutional policy of practising... Read more
Published on 26 Mar 2010 by Peter Piper
The Truth Revealed
Wafa Sultan opens a can of worms in her account of Isamic practices and the degrading of their women. Read more
Published on 4 Mar 2010 by Welchman
An Eye Opener
This book is a straight inquiry into the subject and extremely politically incorrect. But this direct view on the subject was desperately needed. Read more
Published on 24 Feb 2010 by S. Singh
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