Mick Hartley

Women's football, that is. 

Asha Roy, 17, was excited to take part in a women's football tournament, but her hopes were dashed as Islamists forced the organisers to cancel the match in northern Bangladesh.

Shortly before the game began earlier this month, the Islami Andolan Bangladesh group announced a protest rally against the event in Rangpur region, saying it was un-Islamic.

Fearing trouble, local police stepped in and the women's team members were asked to return to their home for their safety….

The Islamists insist that the match they stopped was against their religious values and say that they are determined to prevent any future football games.

"If women want to play football, they should cover their entire body, and they can play only in front of female spectators. Men cannot watch them play," Maulana Ashraf Ali, the leader of the Islami Andolan Bangladesh in the Taraganj area of Rangpur, told the BBC.

Mr Ali also insisted that the group "definitely" want hard-line Islamic Sharia law in Bangladesh.

It seems to be a one-way thing, this increasing hard-line Islamification. No Muslim country, as far as I can tell, is liberalising: it's all the other way, with women, as ever, the biggest victims.

In Katje Adler's recent two-parter report from the Balkans she made some interesting comments from Kosovo, where the Muslim faith of the young used to be of the kind we saw here as Christianity declined: they paid some lip-service so as not to offend their parents, but weren't really interested. Recently, though, Saudi Arabia has been pouring billions into a program of Mosque-building, and spreading their hard-line Wahhabi teachings. Now you see young woman in black, all veiled up….