This surprised me, to put it mildly. I know women who are proPalestinian alright, but I know many conscious, active feminists who are pro-Israeli. The majority of women, I assume, like the majority of everybody, see right and wrong on both sides.

The article, assuming that 'feminists' are pro-Islam, asked how western women can support cultures in which women are stoned to death for adultery, can be divorced on a man's word, cover their faces or get acid thrown on them, are denied education and healthcare and much more. All of which is well worth asking. I certainly wouldn't want to live in a culture where women walk behind men, to start with. Even newspaper photos of gatherings in places such as Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Afghanistan infuriate me when the captions talk of the 'people' in the photo . . . they're not the people, they're the men and boys.

For myself, the values of Christianity, as expanded by ideals like those of the French revolution or the early trade union movement or socialism, would be just fine if they were put into practice. In other words, I'm western.

But I do not, like the writer of the article, take it for granted that I understand Islamic cultures. Or that the values of western cultures are terrifically superior.

For one thing, I visited Iran after the Islamic revolution, and brief as my time there was, I met women who had chosen to come back from modern, assimilated lives in places like Los Angeles and Oxford and Paris because that was their choice. They chose to live in a theocratic society. In general, hard as it was for me to believe it, I met many women who felt themselves protected and empowered by what I saw as the oppressive dominance of men.

I met them in relaxed and unwatched circumstances . . . at a children's gymnastics competition, for example, and at a wedding . . . and they made it clear that it seemed to them their ways are better than our ways.

An example was covering up with the chador. Western commentators are appalled by women having to hide themselves. But women I met pitied western women for having to be on display all the time and were equally appalled by the use of women's bodies in western advertising. 'Why should the seminude bodies of women be displayed on huge billboards on highways?' was the kind of point they made. And for just a few hours, when I came back to our world, it seemed to me, too, that how the female body is used in the west is, indeed, a weird thing.

If we saw ourselves from outside, we would not be as sure of our superiority as the author of the article. What is so great about a world where starving children pick over the tarmac of roads in the hope a few grains of wheat might have fallen from a lorry? Where whole communities of adults out of their minds on drink, or drugs like methamphetamine, use their children sexually and in other ways torture them? What's so great about pornography being the most popular industry on the internet? About walking through cities at night and seeing fellow human beings asleep in doorways? About watching the toil and privation men and women endure in order just to subsist . . . in mines in South America, in brothels, on their knees on peasant farms . . . while the likes of Paris Hilton and Stephanie of Monaco and Mike Tyson are worshipped?

Just as the writer of the article picked out vivid examples of women's oppression in Islamic countries, I could talk about my culture, where women slide down poles in high heels in front of masturbating men for small sums of money, or women clean offices in the middle of the night while men sleep, or women hide with their children below window height in refuges for fear of the violence of the fathers of the children, or women are denied treatment for foetus-threatening cancers because men called priests forbid it. I would be doing what she was doing . . . Exaggerating, for the sake of argument.

Criticism of Islamic cultures should flourish. And let it be strong and sustained: it was al-Qaeda, after all, who murdered the innocents of the Twin Towers, not the other way round. Let us be rightly glad that a Taliban could not rise to power in the western world, however powerful the so-called Christian right may become. Let attacks on the misogyny of Islam continue. But let there be selfcriticism, too. The fact has to be acknowledged that human beings have failed in the project of living together, and they've failed everywhere.

There are degrees of failure, of course, and our failure is different from theirs. But we have failed, too.