Dear Editor,

Mr Sheik Mustapha’s declaration that our “womenfolk are the epitome of immorality” (KN July 2) reminds me of an exchange between British Professor Richard Dawkins and a religious fundamentalist in Gaza.

In a documentary examining various belief systems (the programme is called ‘The root of all evil’ and is available on Google video) Dr Dawkins interviews Joseph Cohen, a secular Jew who moved from Brooklyn NY, converted to Islam and changed his name to Yousef Al Katab. The professor felt that with Al Katab he might be able to get a more balanced view of the religious underpinning of Middle East conflict.

Boy, was he wrong!

“Do you want Islam to take over the rest world?” Dr Dawkins asked as the interview drew to a close.
“Of course I want it to,” Al Katab declared, adding, “and it will.”

“My advice,” he continued, “is to clean up your show at home, take your forces off our lands, correct yourselves, fix your society, aw right? – fix your women…

“Fix your women?” Professor Dawkins interrupted, “that’s not my business. That’s the women’s business! They’re not ‘my’ women.”

But Al Katab would have none of it. “No,” he interjected. “It is your business. When you take the women and dress them like whores on the street…”

“I don’t dress women,” Dawkins protested. “They dress themselves.”

“But you allow it as a norm,” Al Katab insisted. “To let the women go on the street dressed like this. What’s going with your society?”

What we have here is a clash of world views; that of the modern concepts of freedom and equality versus a stifling, archaic, domineering and chauvinistic mindset trying to pass itself off as a higher moral code.

Al Katab has taken the lowest thing he can imagine of some women and is wielding it as a weapon to subjugate all women.

I had asked Mr Mustapha why he wants everyone in our plural society to adhere to his private understanding of religious rules; why women are being accused of immorality because they do not live up to some man’s sanctimonious (and harshly mediaeval) expectations. That question is answered in the documentary.

In fact, everyone interested in how the forces of fundamentalist unreason are working on many fronts to control our society should take a look at the programme.

Yours faithfully,
Justin de Freitas