In our diverse society the family justice system - and others thoroughly imbued with 'traditional English' beliefs - may be called on the make decisions based on beliefs that they little of.

In this case the attitude of Moslem men towards girls.

This seems to have contributed towards er, shall we say, scepticism about how caring a Moslem father would be towards his baby girl.

I claim very modest information about Islam, being myself  'traditional English' of nominally Anglican parents and now a secular rationalist. But I spent much of my childhood in an Islamic country, and that was almost the only formal religious education I had.

 Those that argue - and they do exist and are taken seriously - that Islam is a gender equality religion seem to me to have, well, an uphill task. It is spelt out in the Holy Quran that women's testimony is of less value than that of a man in courts of law, they should be paid less, they should inherit less and so on.

There is even an explicit sura which says 'Men are superior to women because God ordered it so....'

But apparently the translation of this is contested. Some argue that a better rendering would be 'Men have responsibility for women' or 'Men have women in their charge'

 I do not exactly claim the scholarship to question either view, but this latter view is the one that best corresponds with my view of the ethos of the whole work. It is certainly not gender equality as the West  understands it in the 21st century, but nor is it the crass view sometimes attributed to Islam.

Women have serious rights, and those people who have power, wealth, privilege can expect to answer before God that they have discharged their duties with the compassion, care and fairness that their Faith demands. Theirr obligations to promote the welfare of women are indeed greater than those to men, for they are deemed more vulnerable.

So where do the Taliban and so on get their views from? I have a theory. You are supposed not the study the Quran except in the original Arabic. How many of the so-called religious leaders in Afghanistan can do that? Do they attribute to their religion beliefs which are in fact based on their own ignorance of what their holy book actually says?