Wafa Sultan (; born June 14, 1958) is a Syrian-American medical doctor, writer, and critic of Islam. Early life and career Sultan was born into a modest middle class Alawite 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. On February 21, 2006, she took part in Al Jazeera's weekly forty-five-minute discussion program The Opposite Direction. She spoke from Los Angeles, arguing with host Faisal al-Qassem and with Ibrahim Al-Khouli, a professor at Al-Azhar University in Cairo (Egypt), about Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory. A six-minute composite video of her remarks was subtitled and widely circulated by MEMRI on blogs and through e-mail; The New York Times estimated that it has been seen at least one million times. In this video she criticised women's situation in