Lubna Hussein wearing the pants for which she was convicted of public indecency in Sudan. Source: Associated Press

The Muslim morality police in Sudan who arrested twelve women last summer, including journalist Lubna Hussein, for wearing “indecent clothing” in public (pants, as it turns out) and more recently whipped 16-year-old Silva Kashif, a Christian girl from southern Sudan, for wearing a below-the-knee skirt have been roundly denounced in the Western media, mostly for the severity of the prescribed punishment: ten lashes for the women who pleaded guilty, forty for Hussein after she went to trial and lost, and fifty for Kashif, administered on the spot.

But if we set aside the medieval nature of the sentence, one can speculate on the reasons behind the law, which are not as outlandish as they may seem.

The Puritan ethic,

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