A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan

She was accustomed to a tradition in which a woman waited upon her husband, and in which it was unseemly for her to ask him to do anything for her. I would argue with my mother, and she would usually leave the house swearing never to visit us again.
    My two brothers were no less critical of the way my husband and I behaved and, half jokingly, half seriously, would refer to my husband as my slave. My husband treated their jokes with magnanimity and insisted that I was a woman who deserved to be treated well. Our “odd” beliefs—as others considered them—set us apart, and we were sometimes accused of being Marxists, as people believed that anyone who deviated from Islam had to be a godless communist.
    I graduated from medical school in 1981, three months after Mazen was born, and was immediately given a job as a doctor in a mountain village far from the center of the country and sixty kilometers away from the nearest first-aid center. My husband and I moved to the village called “Kinsebba” and rented a house from the local sheikh, Muhammad. He looked after the mosque, called people to prayer at the appointed times, and lived in a little room behind our house.
    The sheikh’s wife and seven children lived far away in another town where some of them were at university, and came to visit him only for a short period over the summer holidays, as they were not on good terms with him. We became very friendly with the sheikh, largely because he was a cheerful man with a sense of humor, and we would spend long hours together in half-serious, half-humorous discussion of Islam and its teachings. He often repeated to us his dictum: “Believe me, if they stopped paying mosque sheikhs’ salaries, there wouldn’t be a single mosque left open in all Syria!” I remember one stormy winter’s day when the village was struck by lightning and the sheikh discovered the following morning that the minaret and its equipment had been damaged. He came back to us smiling, saying jokingly, “I thank God for having given me a holiday until the mosque gets repaired.”
    He treated my husband and me as if we were his children, trusting and confiding in us. He told us more than once of his experiences as a policeman and how he would accept bribes and beat people up in the interrogation rooms. Later he changed jobs and became a truck driver, and he told us how he would steal some of the goods he was transporting. Later still he became a doorkeeper at a brothel, before eventually returning to his native village after his wife and children had disowned him. He repented, asked God for forgiveness, and became the village sheikh. His fondness for joking was not in any way frivolous; rather, it reflected the psychological struggle he was engaged in, which I had observed ever since we had first met him.
    Our friendship with him increased our doubts regarding the sincerity of the clergy, and in our conversations with him we often strayed into forbidden territory on the pretext of just joking around. He was by no means an ignorant man and was a fine practitioner of the art of conversation. He may have sensed from the outset that we wanted to use the appearance of joking to arrive at a number of truths. He himself had never doubted the truth of Islamic teachings for a minute. Nonetheless, he would usually evade answering direct questions by saying that only God knew, leaving us with the impression that he himself was not fully convinced of what he believed. In this he was very different from other sheikhs, who insisted that they had a monopoly of absolute truth.
    When we left the village after three years of living next door to him, we had hundreds of unanswered questions. Our friendship with him had intensified both our doubts and our desire to search for the truth. However, I still insisted on retaining my links with Islam, fragile as they were.
    Sheikh Muhammad was not our only local source of doubts regarding the teachings of Islam. During my time in