BOOKS Nine Parts Of Desire: The Hidden World Of Islamic Women. Geraldine Brooks (Penguin) This is a searing indictment of Islam's attitude towards women without ever resorting to hyperbole, outrage or condemnation. Throughout, author Geraldine Brooks simply observes and asks 'why?' Why does Saudi Arabia refuse women basic human rights, why does Islam refuse to condemn female circumcision, why is Islamic fundamentalism so deeply mysoginistic and why does the world community allow such mysoginy to go on all but unchallenged? Towards the end of this exhaustively researched and fascinating book, Brooks puts the position of the Islamic woman in stark context by reversing the gender. Would the world community stand idly by if 90 million little boys were having their penises amputated? She then substitutes race for gender and asks: 'Say a country, a close Western ally and trading partner, had a population half white, half black. The whites had complete control of the blacks. They could beat them if they disobeyed. They deprived them of the right to leave the house without permission: to walk unmolested without wearing the official segregating dress; to hold any decent job in the government, or to work at all without the permission of the whites in control of them. Would there have been an uproar in our countries by now?' It is through such pithy observations as this (the description of the blacks is an exact representation of the way women are treated in Saudi Arabia) that Brooks exposes the injustice of the Islamic system towards women.

This is a cracking book, which should be read by anyone who needs to be reminded of how quickly basic human rights can be lost in the face of religious zealotry, and by certain men who have begun to think women are merely a commodity.