I recently received a transcript of a Q&A session with Daisy Khan which occured this past July at the Chautauqua Institution. Khan is the wife of the infamous Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — the man behind the highly controversial Islamic supremacist mega-mosque scheduled to be built blocks away from the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Here is the transcript of the question involving me, and Daisy Khan’s response:
Q: There is a woman from the west coast I believe, I’m not sure of her name, her family name is Sultan I think, and maybe something like …
DK: Wafa Sultan.
Q: Yeah. And I’m wondering if you can speak to her, how should I put this … her views are somewhat different and more anti-Islamic, I believe. She has testified in some freedom of speech trial in the Netherlands recently, and I wonder if you can speak about her views and how it all fits together.
DK: Yeah. Umm, the little I know about Wafa Sultan is that she was traumatized as a child, umm, when she was in school, and there was a band of extremists that came in and shot a whole bunch of students in school, and she actually witnessed that. So when you have such a negative memory of religious people, or people doing something (like that) in the name of religion, it is a deep trauma, and I personally believe that this trauma is working through her own work in the United States.
Much of what she says is deeply incoherent. I’m happy to engage with people if they are truly struggling to understand, but you cannot remove 1400 years of evolution of a faith and just call it a bad religion. You know, people like me that are Muslims, and there are millions and billions of Muslims that are good, honorable people. And when you throw the baby out with the bathwater you know that it is just an absolute rejection, and there are people like that exist in every community, and certainly we have our share, uh, but I have a hard time engaging her.
I’ve invited her to several of my conferences, because I try to reach out to people like that, but she has always refused to come.
Although, I did write an article in May of this year exposing Daisy’s husband, Imam Rauf, I have never received a single communication from her and she has never invited me to any of her conferences.
It’s very disturbing that Daisy would lie about having invited me to discuss what is written plainly in the Koran. If she can be so overtly deceptive in front of hundreds of people in the audience about such a trivial matter as an invitation to a conference, surely her credibility is damaged by such a performance, and her integrity has been severely compromised. She lies about offering an invitation to me and misrepresents Islam when addressing audiences about interfaith unity.
I have devoted my life to exposing the brutality and political, totalitarian nature of Islam. This is why Khan tries to demonize me, and why she labors so diligently to obscure the truth.
It’s clear that Daisy Khan has no problem evading the indisputable historical evidence within Islamic doctrine that demands the subjugation of all non-Muslims to its tenets, and the punishment given to all who reject its authority. This is the source of Daisy’s problem with me, judging from her accusations against me and her evaluation of what she considers my anti-Islamic sentiments. Apparently, she — like her husband — is skilled in the practice of taqiyyah: lying when dealing with non-Muslims, a practice fully sanctioned and promoted within Islam.
As the point-men for the proposed Ground Zero mosque, both Daisy and Imam Rauf demonstrate how agile they can be at deflecting legitimate scrutiny of their actions and obscuring their true intentions. Daisy Khan’s dishonesty about having invited me to attend her conferences is characteristic of the kind of maneuvering and manipulation she engages in with her audiences.
As for my understanding of Islam: unlike Daisy Khan, I grew up in Syria, studying Islamic texts in Arabic. Daisy Kahn, on the other hand, was born in Kashmir, where Arabic is not her first language. That makes me better qualified to understand Islam than Daisy.
My “trauma” is not merely the result of isolated childhood experiences, or one incident that occurred when I was in medical school. The trauma built up as a result of countless acts of vicious violence and cruelty which I witnessed during my thirty-two years living in Syria. These crimes were committed in particular against women.
My niece was eleven years old when she was forced to marry a man in his forties. She suffered tremendously and endured horrific abuse and humiliation — behavior not only taught under the prescriptions for the treatment of women and wives in particular, but mandated under Islamic Law, or sharia. Although she pleaded with her father to escape from the hell she suffered under her abusive husband, she was not allowed to end the marriage.
She was twenty-eight when she finally gave up and committed suicide.
During my practice as a physician, I have treated numerous abused women who were severely beaten and raped. If that weren’t enough, now that I have left Islam, I too am subjected to the cruel death penalty sanctioned by sharia against apostates.
As a member of Former Muslims United, last September — along with other former Muslims — I drafted a letter which was distributed to more than 100 Muslim clergy nationwide, including Imam Rauf and his wife Daisy. We asked them to sign the The Freedom Pledge, a declaration that calls for support for religious freedom and safety from harm for former Muslims. (Sharia requires a death penalty for anyone who leaves Islam.) We asked Muslims — those who call themselves “moderates” — to “repudiate the threat from authoritative Sharia to the religious freedom and safety of former Muslims.”
Almost a year has passed, and neither Daisy nor Imam Rauf have responded to the letter and its call for tolerance of Muslim “apostates.” It seems that “reaching out” in brotherly love and acceptance is a one-way street for Daisy — when she isn’t fabricating those gestures.
As for her claim of“1400 years of evolution of a faith”: Islam is in dire need of an enlightenment to transport its doctrines from the middle-ages to modernity. Muslims regard the Koran as the immutable word of Allah. Therefore, jihad to spread Islam and submit all other non-Muslims to Sharia is an order established in perpetuity until Islam has completed its divine mandate that all the world submit to Islam and to Allah. Such totalitarianism is incompatible with the democratic principles of western civilization, and is certainly out of sync with ideals that promote equality among people of all faiths and cultures.
Reformation to bring Islamic doctrine into a genuinely moderate position is desperately needed. Among the 57 Muslims countries comprising the Organization of the Islamic Conference — none of which are liberal democracies — harsh and appallingly discriminatory sharia law brutalizes hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Women in particular.
Is that the Islamic “evolution” Daisy Khan mentions?
This simple call for transparency where Islamic doctrine is concerned and the call for an enlightenment are the reasons Daisy is motivated to both misrepresent herself, me, and what I stand for. I’m not at all surprised she found it necessary to lie to protect herself and her interests from the scrutiny of inquiring minds at Chautauqua Institution and elsewhere.
Daisy Kahn can continue to evade the truth, but it confronts her at every turn and belies every false claim she makes at such events. The facts remain, untarnished by misrepresentations and lies.
No other religion that I am familiar with dictates that others must abide by a brutal system of governing the masses, controlling entire populations under the strict and humiliating sharia. The crimes committed by jihadists before my eyes, and all around me as I was growing up, are thoroughly justified by the Koran, and examples of just how to carry out such brutality are provided in the Hadith.
These truths are what Daisy Khan tries to conceal from her audiences, why she attempts to discredit me, and why she lies about having invited me to attend her conferences. Muhammad is quoted in a canonical Hadith (the words or deeds of Muhammad, deemed most authentic) as saying: “War is deceit.” Daisy has mastered the practice quite well.
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