It's time for universities to address segregation on their campuses

There’s an interesting battle shaping up on university campuses over Islamic societies segregating their events. Today’s Guardian highlights the most recent example of this at the University of Leicester where men and women were directed to separate entrances for a lecture entitled ‘Does God exist?’

The speaker, Hamza Tzortis, is a member of the Islamic Education and Research Academy, a group which was itself banned from UCL last month after trying to segregate an event. This trend of segregating events in this country is a bizarre one. Even at Islam’s most holy site, the Grand Mosque in Makkah, entrances are not segregated nor is the pilgrimage performed inside. Indeed, all this is reminiscent of the bald warning from Dr Barham Salih in 2008 when he was Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq, that some mosques in Blackburn are more extreme than those in Baghdad.