SIR - Ayub Khan (Letters, October 15) fails to disclose that when a nun covers herself for God, it is usually through her own personal choice - unlike that of Muslim women living under Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the al Qaida group, where they are degradingly and violently forced to be completely covered, robbed of their basic human rights and ordered about like animals.

If this is not oppression in its excessive form, I fail to know what is!

Ayub Khan's other statement that Muslim children are deemed failures for dedicating themselves to Islam is pure nonsense!

Many Muslim men and women throughout the world are enjoying successful careers. They have achieved this, however, by recognising that apart from their faith they must also dedicate themselves in many other ways.

They have also recognised that fundamentalism achieves nothing in this world other than hate, envy and a frustrated subculture with a substandard outlook on life.

Sajid Hussain, Harrogate Road, Bradford 2.

SIR - May I answer M A Choudhury's letter (T&A, October 15).

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the word "terrorism" as "the use of violent and intimidating methods to coerce a government or community."

The totally-unprovoked atrocities carried out on thousands of innocent people by bin Laden and his network automatically and unequivocally place them in the above category.

Given such a loss of life in such a short space of time, the only words that categorise the response by America and the UK - who sustained most of the victims - have to be "justifiable retaliation".

The killing of innocent people in America was deliberate. The killing of innocent people in Afghanistan has occurred accidentally while trying to eradicate the evil that has no regard for any other human life apart from its own.

Mohammed Ashraf, Dudley Street, Bradford.

SIR - Z Jabeen complains of the destruction of holy places and a nation's history in the current bombing of Afghanistan (Letters, October 17).

Readers should remember that in March of this year the Taliban, in the face of widespread international condemnation, carried out a complex explosives operation to blow up the three monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, the largest of which, hewn from a cliff in the 5th century AD, was 175 feet high.

Nothing now remains of them.

Dr Timothy Taylor, Lecturer in Archaeology, Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford

SIR - Poor old Louise Eaton is getting a lot of stick for suggesting that the World Trade Centre bombings weren't the only atrocities committed in recent history. To accuse her of anti-Americanism is ridiculous.

This is a woman who teaches Appalachian dancing. She and her husband Alex spread appreciation and love of American folk and blues music.

But it is one thing to love the wonderful polyglot multicultural melting pot which is the American people, another to endorse the actions of their oligarchic oppressors who have attempted to overthrow no less than 40 foreign governments and have crushed more than 30 freedom movements since 1945.

I am sure Louise mourns the 13,000 people killed in London in the 1940 Nazi blitz, the 500 killed in Coventry, and the 10,000 killed in the rest of Britain.

But it was people like Louise who pointed out that the German Condor Legion attack on the small Spanish city of Guernica on April 26, 1937 (killing 1,500 people) was the direct consequence of British and American financing of Hitler as a bulwark against communism, much as the US CIA financed and armed bin Laden when he was a "heroic freedom fighter" against the Red Army, rather than the terrorist he has always been.

Karl Dallas, HoustonMedia, Church Green, Bradford 8.

SIR - The courage of Bradfordians never fails to impress me.

We read so much bad news about the war in your paper, yet we find time to argue which pop group is better than the other in the letters page.

I personally have heard of neither Terrorvision nor The Negatives though I am sure they are both very good if you like that sort of thing.

It reminds me of letters we used to see during the last war. Then we used to argue who was the best, Arthur Askey or Tommy Trinder.

Fabulous memories, I am sure, and a wonderful British way to keep our "bulldog" spirits up... Bravo!

L Dunn, North Park Road, Heaton.