I was concerned to read Sarah Carabott’s news item about the attacks against Tunisian universities by militant Salafist fanatics in Manouba and Sousse (The Sunday Times, December 4).

In particular I wish to express my heartfelt solidarity with Habib Kazdaghli, his family and his colleagues, at the Humanities and Literature Faculty in Manouba, Tunis.

This is a campus where I myself have lectured, and Prof. Kazdaghli is an esteemed and genial scholar with whom I jointly participated in conferences elsewhere in Tunis.

The Salafist request that, henceforth, male and female university students be segregated into separate lecture rooms, let alone the beaches; or that female students be expected to cover their faces and suchlike, is ridiculous. It makes me throw up.

As far as I recall, there was open participation in class and no such things existed there at all, and nor should they, if what we have come to regard as civilisation is to prevail.

While I am not aware that Prof. Kazdaghli has “published several studies of the Maltese community in Tunisia”, as reported by Ms Carabott, in which case I would wish our library to acquire them, he has certainly taken an interest in this socially fascinating matter (and three other Tunisian scholars who have written articles about various aspects of it over the years); and indeed he has been engaged in research about all other European communities in Tunisia which, as very correctly reported, he considers “part and parcel of the historical and cultural texture of Tunisia”, as indeed they have been also of Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and beyond.

The proceedings of a congress on this theme, under Prof. Kazdaghli’s aegis, throw much valuable light on European-Tunisian relations in migrant settlement, inter-ethnic and cross-cultural relations, an area covered by our Maltese Studies students. Prohibitions and violently intolerant attitudes such as those being demonstrated in Tunisia by Salafists, and any others of their ilk, bode very badly for the free future of this neighbouring and friendly country and its people, and must be nipped in the bud. Corruption, surveillance and repression under Ben Ali were bad enough but a measure of secularism and modernity in ‘his’ Tunisia were positives.

It would be sad if Tunisia (or other neighbouring countries for that matter) were to go from the frying pan into the fire, if one can say so. I hope none of these countries will, but the future is not to tell. One hopes for the best, if freedom is given a chance.

The strong Salafist showing in the recent Egyptian elections is particularly disconcerting, given the persecution and massacres of indigenous Copts, which have been taking place by Muslim fundamentalists and extremists, rivalling the Wahhabis of Bin Laden fame in Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.

I was appalled recently in Alexandria, a city I knew well, to see well-educated young women being constrained to wear veils or risk being labelled ‘infidels’, and by the ascendancy of fanatical Muslim Brotherhood elements, in a part of the world where a glass of wine with a fish meal in a restaurant, in Montazah no less, was never much to ask for.

The irony is that it was the more liberal and open-minded sections of Arab society who led the Arab Spring, not these.

Does the ‘revolution’ risk being devoured by its sons, as has sometimes happened before in history, as in Iran, but also in Europe? God forbid.