Sultan grammar—uses the same words for both women and men. However, this styling misconstrues the roles of wives of sultans. In a similar usage, the wife of a German field marshal might be styled "Frau Feldmarschall" (similarly, in French, constructions of the type "madame la maréchale" are quite common). The female leaders in Muslim history are correctly known as "sultanas". However, the wife of the sultan in the Sultanate of Sulu is styled as the "panguian" while the sultan's chief wife in many sultanates of Indonesia and Malaysia are known as "permaisuri", "Tunku Ampuan", "Raja Perempuan", or "Tengku Ampuan". The queen
Wafa Sultan Wafa Sultan Wafa Sultan (; 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