Where Muslims are the victims of racism, once again the question arises: why can't people oppose white racism and clerical reaction with equal strength and for the same reasons? A commitment to fight prejudice does not exclude the possibility of criticising religious texts and religious movements. Indeed, any serious commitment against prejudice must include a willingness to fight men who would use religion to censor, subjugate and kill.

Tax ends with a radical suggestion for the Anglo-American Left: "Instead of allying with and protecting the Muslim Right, how about solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South?" I have been saying the same thing for years and know as well as Tax and Sahgal do that there is a long struggle to shift attitudes.

I don't want to criticise them, for they are among the best people I know, but they underestimate how it suits Westerners to ignore religious oppression. On the Left, radical Islam has taken the place once filled by socialism. As I said in my book What's Left?, when the dreams of Karl Marx died, many leftists concluded that any enemy of the West was better than none. It did not matter that the most violent enemies of the West were against everything leftists supported. They were also against America and that was all that mattered. Beyond the Left, in the politically indifferent mainstream, ignoring oppression has its advantages. Members of a consumer society do not want to campaign against the mistreatment of women in immigrant communities at home or support costly and dangerous interventions abroad. They want to get and spend. Rousing a nation of shoppers against injustice is always a hard task, and it seems to me that one of the chief functions of Anglo-American intellectuals is to provide respectable reasons for staying quiet.

That so many liberals are prepared to urge quiescence is a scandal. That Southall Black Sisters, Meredith Tax and Gita Sahgal are prepared to fight them is a reason for hope. Their Centre for Secular Space is, by the way, desperately short of money. The rich Quakers and progressives who opened their wallets for Cageprisoners will not fund feminists. If you can afford to help, may I point you in their direction and suggest that there is no worthier cause around?