Wafa Sultan

Wafa Sultan
Wafa Sultan in May 2012
Born	(1958-06-14) 14 June 1958 (age 58) Baniyas, Syria
Residence	Los Angeles, California
Citizenship	Syria, United States
Education	Medicine (psychiatry)
Alma mater	University of Aleppo
Occupation	Psychiatrist
Known for	Criticism of Islam
Title	Doctor

Wafa Sultan (Arabic: وفاء سلطان‎‎; born June 14, 1958) is a medical doctor who trained as a psychiatrist in Syria, and a U.S. author and critic of Muslim society and Islam.

Sultan was born into a large traditional Alawite Muslim family in Baniyas, Syria.

Although Sultan wanted to be a writer, and would have preferred to study Arabic literature, she studied at the medical faculty at the University of Aleppo due to pressure from her family. She says that she was shocked into secularism by the 1979 atrocities committed by Islamic extremists of the Muslim Brotherhood against innocent Syrians. She states that while she was a medical student, she witnessed the machine-gun assassination of her professor, Yusef al Yusef, an ophthalmologist from the university who was renowned outside Syria. "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'Allahu Akbar!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god." She worked for four years as a psychiatrist in a hospital.

She, her teacher husband, and children emigrated to the United States in 1989, where she moved to Los Angeles, California, and became a naturalized citizen. Initially she had to work as a cashier in a gas station and behind the counter in a pizza parlor, but she found her treatment in these jobs better than as a medical professional in Syria. From the time of her arrival she began to contribute articles to Arabic publications in the United States and published three books in Arabic.

Sultan became notable after the September 11, 2001 attacks for her participation in Middle East political debates, with the publication of Arabic essays that were circulated widely and for television appearances on Al Jazeera and CNN in 2005.