Illiberal threat

There ought to be an outraged reaction from all our influential and not-so-influential women (and unbiased men) in response to Brunei’s Sultan’s reported imposition of strict Sharia law (your report, 2 May).

The so-called West’s citizens are keeping too quiet on the subject as fundamentalist Islamic groups try to extend their restrictive sway in other particularly susceptible countries, such as Mali, Nigeria, the Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria and Turkey.

Adherents to Islam are not, of course, evil, but the extremists do seem not just potentially but in actuality to be a positive danger to relatively free-wheeling societies like ours.

Apart from the obvious menace from direct physical attacks on people and property, the indirect undermining of our liberal ways as allegedly in Birmingham schools and at Tower Hamlets in London, and in faith schools which deny evolution “because it is not in the Koran” needs to be challenged.

Women and girls in particular have to stand up against being subordinated to men, not least in being restricted in what clothes they can wear and with whom they can associate. Let’s hear from them.

Joe Darby

Dingwall

Ross-shire