Sultana (title) Sultana (title) Sultana or sultanah (; ") is a female royal title, and a feminine form of the word sultan. This term has been officially used for female monarchs in some Islamic states, and historically it was also used for sultan's consorts. Nevertheless, westerners have also used the title to refer to Muslim women monarchs and sultan's women relatives who do not hold this title officially. The term sultana is a feminine form of the word sultan (), an Arabic abstract noun meaning "strength", "authority", "rulership", derived from the verbal noun ", meaning "authority" or "power". Later, sultan came to
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