To see the perplexities of modern Islam, take four-and-a-half minutes to watch this video recently broadcast on the Egyptian television station Al-Nahar, and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The host is Riham Sahid, who is interviewing “Dr. Noha,” a Wahhabi (“Salafist”) Muslim whose full name is Noha Mahmoud Salem.

In a reversal of roles, the apparently liberal host interviews the hijab-clad doctor, but it turns into a shouting match about what “real” Muslims believe, with the host taking the Islamic hard line: Allah and not Muhummad wrote the Qur’an, sharia law should be implemented everywhere, and Allah answers all prayers. (Sahid claims that Allah would give her a million pounds if she prayed for it, which makes me wonder why she doesn’t.) It’s quite startling to hear Sahid, seemingly a modern woman clad in Western dress, espousing chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning adultresses to death (of course she doesn’t mention the male partner).

It turns out that Dr. Salem wore the hijab to hide her identity, for she says things that brand her as an apostate under sharia law, and therefore as someone who, according to that law, must be killed. But it’s heartening to hear the courageous doctor stand up for her views, calling much of Islam “a myth,” asserting that Muhammad himself and not Allah wrote the Qur’an, and claiming, based on experience, that Allah doesn’t respond to prayer. Salem’s statements make her seem only a hairsbreadth away from being an atheist.

In fact, according to a profile in last year’s Egypt Independent, she is. After 29 years of marriage, her Muslim husband, who beat her and treated her like chattel, divorced her. She gave up Islam, and all religion, after rereading the Qur’an, and remarried another atheist. Ironically, the ceremony was Muslim, and, to satisfy the family, both bride and groom swore fealty to Allah.

Sahid gets really exercised at the challenges to her faith, and winds up calling Dr. Salem “ignorant.” Sahid boasts, not realizing the irony, “I am proud to be an ignoramus.” Finally, the exasperated Sahid boots her interviewee out of the studio, saying that she had wasted her time with a “crazy woman.” But it is Dr. Salem who is rational and Sahid who believes in fairy tales.