allowed to enter mosques, together with their men or alone? In nut shell, are you willing to accept that anything of conservative Islam needs to be reinterpreted? I am afraid not. All the other religions have changed, except THE ONE. Dalei lam once said that if he has to choose between scientific knowledge and his faith, he will choose the science. Brave man. he has not been killed yet from fanatics. A muslim saying that will have difficulties to live peacefully. I should know. "We are witnessing a reversion to the type of cultural essentialism that dominated political and academic discourse until the mid-1900s. Its central theme, the purity and superiority of European culture, was dealt a powerful blow by the tradition of post-colonial studies and radical critique of Orientalism." Perhaps all we are witnessing is the Western tradition finally beginning to get its nerve back. Because, almost uniquely, Western scientific, philosophical, and even religious thought has developed powerful mechanisms of self-criticism (the very thing that has made progress possible) it was always going to be vulnerable to sustained assault on its own ground. The very weapons that once were trained on backwardness and superstition in Europe and beyond came close, in the discourses of postmodernism and multi-culturalism, to enabling the suicide of liberal civilisation. Partly thanks to the reality-check of 9/11, when the regressive tendencies of the Islamic Endarkenment forced themselves onto a Western agenda that had happily ignored them, we in the West are being forced to argue