The bravest women in the world

Feminist debate here - what little of it there is - seems to be mainly about whether Big Brother is empowering to or patronising of young women. Many of the same young women would rather die (metaphorically speaking) than own the title of feminist.

In other places women are dying, literally, for the feminist cause. Did Western feminists in the 1970s - so silent these days! - think they had it hard? They had to put up with scorn and ridicule from the media and hostility from conservatives who said they were out to destroy the family. But no one, so far as I can remember, was murdered.

A few examples, of many, of what women in some countries are up against: in northern Afghanistan in May, three women workers at a microcredit organisation (which gives loans to women to start up small businesses) were stoned to death by warlords; in India, a woman social worker in Madhya Pradesh state had her hands chopped off by a man furious because she was counselling villagers against child marriage.

In Pakistan, the head of the Human Rights Commission was stripped and beaten in public after she organised a series of sporting marathons in which women could compete. (One marathon was attacked by 900 men from the Islamist alliance, armed with batons and petrol bombs. President Pervez Musharraf, who talks constantly of curbing Islamic militants, has since reversed his Government's policy of allowing mixed-gender sporting activities in public.)

In Iraq, a wave of attacks on women has been carried out by the new insurgent groups. Said a 23-year-old university student: "They dropped acid in my face and on my legs. They cut all my hair off while hitting me in the face many times, telling me it's the price for not obeying God's wish in using the veil."

Those searching for the "root causes" of terrorism might do well to listen to the terrorists themselves. The leadership of al-Qaeda has said many times that its aim is to set up a global Islamic state. They want a worldwide Islamic theocracy ruled according to sharia law; a world in which women must conceal their faces, where they may not work or be educated, may not go in public without a male relative; a world in which women are under the total control of men. They want a world in which women do not have the option of rejecting them.

A YouGov poll published in London's Daily Telegraph last month found that 32 per cent of British Muslims believed that "Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end". But men were far more likely than women to say this.

As well, the proportion of Muslim men who said they felt no loyalty to Britain (18 per cent) was more than three times higher than the proportion of women who said the same.

In Western countries, young Muslim women tend to do better in education than young Muslim men. Muslim women, it seems, are more likely than men to appreciate Western democracy. And men are more likely to resent it, at least partly because our laws prevent them from controlling women to the extent some - not all - would like to. An Iraqi-Australian woman I talked to thought it funny that a friend of hers can threaten her husband she will go to the police if he attacks her. "He doesn't dare hit her now," she laughed. This same woman said Australian women have no idea how lucky they are.

There may be many reasons for the hatred Islamic extremists have for the West, but high among them is the freedom of women. The West is "decadent and immoral" because in it women are free. The Islamists fear that Western influences will trigger an Islamic feminist revolution.

Too late. The revolution has already begun. Across the Middle East women are organising and demonstrating, demanding their rights, challenging the interpretations of their religion that say they are worth less than men. At great risk to themselves, women in Afghanistan and Pakistan have recently held large protests against the widespread violence towards women that exists in their cultures. Last week brave women in Iraq were holding protests against the proposed constitution now being drafted, which assigns laws on marriage, custody and inheritance to religious authorities. In Canada it was women immigrants from Muslim countries who protested most about proposals to set up an Islamic court there.

Far from this being an era of post-feminism, what is really needed is a new feminist wave across the world - or, if you object to that word, a new global focus on women's rights.

Of course there are Muslim women who will say they are contented under sharia laws, just as here there were women's groups opposed to the feminist reforms that are now taken for granted. There have always been women who collude with their own oppression and perpetuate the traditions that keep them subordinate. But they are wrong, because everywhere that women are oppressed there is backwardness and poverty.

The best thing the West can do to bring about reform in Islamic countries is to engage with the progressive movements in those countries, and while many of those progressives are men, it is women who are the main drivers of reform.

Yes, Muslim feminists are still a minority, but they are a growing minority. And they are the bravest women in the world, and deserve every support and encouragement we can give them. It is not too great an exaggeration to say the future of world security depends on them.