Wafa Sultan
American Syrian-born psychiatrist
Wafa Sultan (Arabic: وفاء سلطان; born June 14, 1958) is a Syrian-American medical doctor, writer, and critic of Islam. In 2006, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Early life
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.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q238419. VIAF identifies the subject as 187511913. The Library of Congress control number is n2009025775. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 2006 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wafa Sultan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.