When God is a monster

He passes by me and I see him not; he moves on but I do not perceive him

-Job 9:11-

Dr. Wafa Sultan is working on a book. The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster." In 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria, gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched. "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' "

"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." Dr. Sultan no longer practices Islam.

Last week, from a link on in the Intellectual Insurgent, I listened to Dr. Sultan’s debate with an Algerian cleric hosted by Al Jazeera and I was stirred by her passionate denunciation of Islamic self-pity, violence and hypocrisy.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

This is progress, I thought, this is the kind of thing that will reform the Muslim world from within and restore some measure of dignity to their religion.

Maybe not. Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, another participant in the discussion asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran. Dr. Sultan takes this as a formal Fatwa and she has begun to receive death threats in e-mail and on her answering machine.

The God or gods of a culture reflect the nature of the people who set themselves up as an interface between us and the divine. Through them, we learn what God likes and what God hates and what God would have us do as his agents. Whenever we wish to commune with the divine, we find a human standing in the hallway, blocking our passage, whether with his physical presence or by the stumbling blocks he and his culture have put in our minds since childhood. The God of monsters is always depicted as a monster. The Men of God are always less than God and sometimes less than human, yet these are all we ever see and ever will see. If there is a God he walks past us unnoticed.