I refer to the letter by Imam Mohammed El-Sadi (January 7).

Mr El-Sadi heavily criticises the law proposed by French President Jacques Chirac, which intends to prohibit the use of religious symbols in French state educational institutions. President Chirac has stipulated that this will include skull caps, headscarves and large crosses.

The French Republic remains Europe's first completely secularised state and, yet, the most sensitive to religious diversity, freedom of religious practice and one of the states in Europe which completely excludes - rather than separates - the Christian Church from the state.

Mr El-Sadi has provided your readers with a complete sermon on why Mr Chirac will be guilty of the sins of thousands of schoolgirls who will not be able to live a normal life like the rest of free France and who will be deprived of the shelter of their headscarves. While I have no qualms with the requirements of Islam from true Muslims, I find it as objectionable as it can get for Mr El-Sadi to actually attempt to take a swipe at the Western world for our lack of democracy and freedom.

I wonder whether, had it been a Muslim state that banned schoolchildren from not wearing Islamic religious symbols, a Muslim newspaper would publish the letter of a Jew or a Christian, or a Hindu, criticising this decision.

Mr El-Sadi, while you are undoubtedly free to air your opinions, as you have rightly done, I am afraid that no Muslim is free to launch the first stone!

I ask Mr El-Sadi: How many Muslim states allow Christian clergymen or religious to don their habit or religious attire in public? How many Muslim states have allowed a meagre fraction of the freedom of worship enjoyed by Muslims throughout the Western world? While there is a mosque in Rome, the centre of the Catholic world, why is there not a church in Mecca? What is the proportionate (dis)equivalent of Christians persecuted and murdered throughout the Muslim world in the last 10 years in comparison to the freedom allowed to Muslims in all Western states?

Very few, if any, Muslim states can compare with the religious freedom inherent with Western democracy and enshrined in our constitutional patrimony.

I am afraid that Mr El-Sadi is not well-placed to criticise Western Christian democracy or Western separation of religious tradition and the state.

Mr El-Sadi will remain not well-placed to do so until the French penalise Muslims for not going to church, as happens to non-Muslims in Muslim states.