AUSTRALIA: Australia's leading Muslim cleric has compared women who do not wear a headscarf to uncovered meat and has hinted they are to blame for sexual assaults, prompting calls for his deportation.
In a Ramadan sermon last month, Sheikh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, the mufti of Sydney's biggest mosque, said sexual assaults might not happen if women wore a hijab and stayed at home.
"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it? The cats or the uncovered meat?
"The uncovered meat is the problem," Sheikh Hilaly said, according to a newspaper translation.
Sheikh Hilaly's spokesman, Keysar Trad, said the Egyptian-born cleric had been lecturing about 500 followers on the sin of adultery.
"He's talking about those people who prey on others, whether men or women, who seek to engage in sexual conduct outside of marriage and do so through alluring types of attire," he said. The meat comments, Mr Trad said, referred to prostitutes.
Sheikh Hilaly's sermon has again strained relations between the conservative government and sections of Australia's Muslim community, which makes up 1.5 per cent of the 20 million population.
Treasurer Peter Costello told Australian television: "I hope that the moderate Muslim leaders will speak out today and condemn these comments, make it clear to Muslims that this is not the view of Islam and that they will really take some kind of action."
Australia's sex discrimination commissioner, Pru Goward, said Sheikh Hilaly, who courted controversy two years ago by glorifying martyrdom and calling the September 11th attacks the work of God, should be deported for inciting rape.
"I would strongly urge the Islamic leadership to ask him to go; we would all support that," Ms Goward told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.
The spokeswoman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, Sherene Hassan, said Sheikh Hilaly's comments were "absolutely repulsive", while Iktimal Hage-Ali, a former government adviser on Muslim issues, said the cleric should be dropped from his position.
Prime minister John Howard in September called on Muslims to conform to Australian values and last year criticised Islamic hardliners for "raving on about jihad".
Muslim leaders have accused Mr Howard of unfairly targeting their community.