Roger Ballard's attack on Terry Eagleton and Daniel Pipes (Letters, THES , October 17) was a rant. The letter is a perfect example of the anticolonial mindset. It confidently takes the moral high ground and ignores the usual academic constraints of coherence, clarity, discrimination and proportion.
This does immense damage to the anticolonial outlook, particularly in the complexity of West-Islam relations.
Clive Christie
University of Hull