“The man was beating his wife only because he wanted to divorce her, and so he could then marry another woman,” claimed Raihan. “It was nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism.”On the face of it, the little clothing factory at the centre of this village in the province of Rajshahi, deep in the Bangladeshi countryside, is a model development project. Started by Swedish aid workers in 1972, it is now entirely under the control of local people, providing employment for a large proportion of the area’s women with its spinning, weaving, tailoring and embroidery sections.Raihan Ali is the project’s manager.”Everything is going well. For the past six months we have had continuous work.” Their goods are bought by Traidcraft, a British company dedicated to importing goods from the Third World and paying a fair wage to those who produce them.

Its charitable arm, Traidcraft Exchange, which runs a business advisory service, has provided a consultant to improve Thanapara’s marketing and communications.Yet for all its tranquillity, Thanapara, like hundreds of similar villages throughout rural Bangladesh, is the scene of an epic battle between two diverging world views – in which the values of Western secularism at their most uncompromising have locked horns with the entrenched ideology of religious fundamentalism.Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world (the average income is about £2.80 a week); as such it receives a high degree of foreign aid. And with that aid comes the values of those who donate the cash. Moves to improve the standing of women may go unquestioned in the West, but in a deeply traditional society like Bangladesh there are many still who object even to the idea of a woman leaving the four walls of her home Its population is 85 per cent Muslim. As a result, moves to empower women are seen in some quarters as insidious attempts to subvert not just the local culture but also its religion.To Western eyes, the impact of the project in Thanapara has been wholly beneficial It provides work for 150 women.

It has also spawned a number of social programmes, including a primary school and schemes for drinking water, sanitation and tree-planting (at 2p a seedling). Its savings scheme enables villagers to take loans to buy poultry or get a tin roof for their wattle-and-daub houses with an interest rate of only 10 per cent – and save them from the usurious local moneylenders who charge at least 50 per cent. It has also brought a new self-confidence to the local women.Throughout the country thousands of similar projects have done the same, though they are not the work of Westerners. The Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), one of the world’s biggest non-governmental development organisations, which is run entirely by local people, places special emphasis on women. To date, some 480,000 women have received BRAC loans to rear chickens, and 400,000 more have had money for cattle, tea planting, silk farming, irrigation and weaving.

And it has taught 13 million women how to treat diarrhoea in their children.Not everyone is impressed, however. “There’s always a pressure against the empowerment of women because people really don’t want their values questioned,” said Lala Silim, assistant export manager of BRAC, “and that’s what we’re trying to do.” Reaction from some fundamentalists has been violent BRAC schools have been burned down. Officials estimate that some 5 per cent of the 700,000 children at BRAC schools have been kept away by parents influenced by Muslim clerics. Some mullahs have even pronounced that a husband has grounds for divorce if his wife joins a BRAC credit co-operative.Until now, such responses have been those of a small minority. But there is a fear that fundamentalists are increasing their hold over the poorest part of the population. “Within 10 years the whole country could become fundamentalist,” said one Western diplomat in Dhaka Others are less alarmist but admit there are worrying signs.