The modern Muslim state has never presented itself as secular. Muslim nationalist forces, trapped by a militant and colonialist West unable to share or export its humanism, were driven to build up a rampart, to entrench themselves within the past.

The Taliban is the Muslim version of the Salem witch trials.

If women's rights are a problem for some modern Muslim men, it is neither because of the Quran nor the Prophet, nor the Islamic tradition, but simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.

While Muslim men describe themselves as insecure in their harems, real or imagined, Westerners describe themselves as self-assured heroes with no fears of women. The tragic dimension so present in Muslim harems - fear of women and male self-doubt - is missing in the Western harem.

The waves of religion based on terrorism in the 1990s are based on the tormented response of a mutilated Muslim society whose progressive forces have been savagely emasculated. Why on earth is the Arab world so hostile to women? Why can it not see women as a force for development?

Women are builders of civil society. We are the ones who are going to build it. You know why? We have no choice. Either you shut up, and you are humiliated, or you do what I'm doing. You scream.