Writers have been confined to gulags all over the Eurasian continent over the past 100 years.

Fatwas are still current against writers whose works have offended conservative Moslems, e.g. Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen. Editors and translators have been killed for dealing with their work.

Hypatia of Alexandria

Let me tell you about someone who should shine as a beacon for truth down the centuries from way back in the early fifth century AD.

Her name was Hypatia. She was a mathematician and philosopher and inventor who lectured at the university associated with the great Museum and Library of Alexandria. That 600-year-old library was burned to the ground during the civil wars of the Roman Empire in the third century AD but some of its vast collection of documents was preserved in a "daughter library" housed in the temple of Serapis.

Hypatia was the librarian of this collection as well as the Head of the Neo-Platonist school of philosophy in the university around the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries AD at a time when Alexandria was being forcibly Christianised by Patriarch Theophilus. Among the many pagan temples he destroyed was that of Serapis and with it the last of the books of the library of Alexandria.

When Theophilus died in 412 AD his cousin Cyril, a fundamentalist monk up in the mountains of Ethiopia came down with his own army of Christian enforcers called parabalani, determined to rid Alexandria of pagans (non-Christians) and all those who did not adhere to Christianity as he defined it.

In 415 he led his thugs in a crusade to demolish synagogues and drive Jews out of the city. The Roman Prefect Orestes protested in the name of civil order. Cyril then urged the mob to deal with Hypatia, the woman whose influence, he told them, had made Orestes take his stance. She had continued to lecture and teach throughout the 10 year crusade against non-Christians.

Hypatia was dragged out into the street and cut to pieces by Cyril's parabalani.

Reserve your right to think

In a time darker than ours, a time when reason was held hostage to fundamentalism, when only one form of thought and belief was permitted, when scholars were denounced and their works destroyed, Hypatia kept teaching and standing up for reason.

"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all," she told her students.

Those words should stay with us when we read the papers, listen to the news, hear the latest demagogue spruiking his zealotry.

We have to think. We have to question. We cannot accept what we are told without thought and consideration. That is what stands between us and the darkness of ignorance and fanaticism.