SIR – One does not have to look far to determine who is truly responsible for the hysterical outrage throughout the Muslim world.

It is not the handful of people engaged in making a film deemed by some to be offensive to Islam – in a free world they are perfectly entitled to criticise or mock anything and anybody.

It is not the US or the West.

It is the Islamic clerics, whose religious and cultural practices have changed little, if at all, since the Middle Ages.

We don’t need the world to have a law outlawing criticism of religion, because the only religion which reacts so violently to criticism is Islam. All of the other major religions engage with their detractors, or simply tolerate them, accepting that different people have different views.

What we do need is the intolerance and hatred generated by so many Islamic preachers to stop, but that won’t happen as the rules by which they control the religion stifle dissent at its roots.

WILL RICHARDS

Malvern