A different question was being asked this week in a Jordanian palace. Why does the West have such a negative view of the place of women in Muslim countries? asked Queen Rania of Jordan at a seminar held in Amman. The participants at this meeting, journalists and editors, failed to answer the question, preferring instead to indulge in anti-Western rhetoric or cry Islamophobia, rather than subjecting Islamic culture to criticism. It is this self-deception that stops the Muslim world from making peace with modernity. They did not discuss the failure of Islamic governments to grant women a measure of protection: not one constitution in the Muslim world upholds sexual equality.

Nor were “honour killings” mentioned. Nor was the tradition of stoning women to death on charges of adultery or fornication. Some estimates put the number of women murdered under those codes at more than 7,000 every year. Perpetrators are rarely punished or escape with merely symbolic prison sentences.

The gruesome subject of female genital mutilation, a crime committed against an estimated 400,000 children each year, was also ignored. Nor was there discussion of hijab, the hooded headgear designed in the 1970s and a symbol of radical Islam. A study by the Iranian Ministry of Education in September 2002 showed that hundreds of schoolgirls attempted suicide because they did not wish to wear the hijab.

The charge sheet is long and serious. But the defendant should not be Islam itself. None of those crimes is authorised by the Koran, or the hadith, the sayings attributed to the Prophet. And yet almost all Muslims try to justify these crimes by citing the defence of “cultural diversity”.

Despite the legal, social and economic handicaps imposed on them, Muslim women are, nevertheless, fighting back. Their principal weapon is education. In many Muslim countries, notably Iran and Saudi Arabia, women form a majority of university students. Last July, Kuwaiti girls accounted for almost 70 per cent of secondary school graduates and won first places in all subjects — yet they could not vote in the general election that followed a few days later.

In many countries women are finding their way into professions previously closed to them. Satellite TV beaming images of women in positions of authority into Muslim homes has been a spur. Thousands of women are active in law, banking, architecture and medicine. Today, women police are back on the beat in Iran for the first time since the 1979 revolution. In some countries, including Iran and Turkey, there are female fighter-bomber pilots. There is also a growing band of women novelists, playwrights and film-makers.

Studies by the International Labour Organisation show that the percentage of women in the workforce in most Muslim countries is increasing. In Iran, women now make up a quarter of the working population, almost twice the figure for 1979, no doubt partially accounted for by the necessities bred by the Iran-Iraq War.

Muslim women have also won the right to vote and stand for election in all but three of the 57 Muslim countries that form the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. The recalcitrant nations are Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Libya. Women hold Cabinet posts in 32 Muslim states. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, has a woman President. Three other countries, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Turkey, have had women Prime Ministers. Two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, are working on constitutions that will enshrine equal rights for women.

But the picture is mixed. The fierce civil war of ideas between radical Islamists and moderates has meant setbacks for women. They now have fewer rights in Pakistan because of the introduction of Sharia, and in Egypt the rise of religious conservatism has meant that the family and peer pressure keep more women subdued.

Nonetheless, while women in the Muslim world are slowly making advances, the story is more depressing among the diaspora, the 20 million Muslims now settled in Europe and North America. Often coming from the least developed parts of the Muslim world, especially from the poorer parts of the Indian subcontinent and North Africa, these Muslims use Islam as an expression of ethnic identity. They present pre-Islamic and para-Islamic tribal and ethnic practices as religious imperatives. These include not only honour-killing but also forced marriages and violence against women who refuse to wear the hijab. It is not an overstatement to say that in some cases Muslim women find themselves more threatened by male fanaticism in Britain and France than they do in Turkey and Iran.

The French Government is currently facing demands by sections of the Muslim community for measures that would be rejected in all but the most reactionary of Muslim states. These include the exemption of Muslim girls from attending classes on biology, group sports, swimming and nature day-trips. There are also demands for separate classes for girls or, where that is not possible, for classroom apartheid, with girls sitting in the back rows. Muslim parents have been jailed for keeping their daughters away from the “corrupting” influence of school.

The hope that these immigrant communities would transmit liberal ideas back into the Muslim world has been, as Heshu Yones’s death starkly shows, woefully misplaced optimism.

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