The empire of Islam

"In Pakistan, rape is dealt with under Islamic laws known as the Hudood Ordinances. These criminalise all sex outside marriage. So, under Hudood, if a rape victim fails to present four male witnesses to the crime, she herself could face punishment. This has made it almost impossible to prosecute rape cases. According to the country's independent Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan".

-- How Pakistan's rape reform ran aground

"Islam ...is strong enough to survive Islamism. Perhaps, in time, the religion's centrality will subside, but, for the forseeable future, the Islamic enlightenment in which so many Western thinkers have placed their hopes -- that is, secularism -- will not sweep the Muslim world. The Islamic revival, and its attendant struggles and ills, is less like the eighteenth century in Europe than like the sixteenth, the age of Luther".

George Packer in The Moderate Martyr, a profile of Mahmound Muhamad Taha and his legacy in Sudan.

P.S. 17 Sept:

"The attackers shot the [seventy year old] nun three times in the back at a children's hospital in the south of [Mogadishu]" - BBC