text: The report, and no doubt the conference totally ignores the fact that right across North Africa in the 1970s and to the mid 1980s, women liberated themselves, in dress, customs and economically, in an unprecedented way.  And they largely did it by themselves, without a grant, study group or expensive conference funded by well meaning "western" universities or UN body.
  Then the majority caught religion and went, voluntarily, back to the customs of the 18th century. Women friends who have gone back to their villages in rural Morocco return shocked by the attitudes they hear in the separate women's quarters of previously open homes. Their sons and daughters are now the background of the terror movements who think they go to heaven by driving vans into crowds of men, women and children.