When so many people face oppression in the Middle East, is there any point in focusing on the rights of minorities?

"What we commonly think of as the 'Arab and Muslim world' is in fact a rich and varied mosaic of peoples. Over the last 50 years, many Middle Eastern minorities have been oppressed or have struggled to survive - be they national groups (Berbers, Kurds, Turkomans, etc), religious communities (Christians, Zoroastrians, Baha'is, etc) or both (Armenians, Jews, etc) …"

This was the blurb for a talk last night hosted by the London Middle East Institute, and attended by a fascinating collection of representatives from the region's forgotten minorities, even a Zoroastrian lady - one of the few remaining adherents of a faith that once dominated Iran and much of the surrounding area.

The main speaker was Egyptian-born Masri Feki, the founder of a French-based pressure group called The Middle East Pact, who had come over from Toulouse.

"Masri Feki sees minority rights as central to his vision of secular democracy," the blurb said. "Now, more than ever, thriving minorities are the cornerstone of a healthy civil society and the key to pluralism and peace in this troubled region."

Well, I'm not so sure about that. As Mr Feki rightly pointed out in his talk, ethnic and religious diversity is something that pan-Arab nationalists and, more recently, Islamists, have tried to obliterate. But what's so special about minorities as such?

How much sympathy should we feel for the Alawite minority who rule Syria? Or the Sunni minority who rule Bahrain? And then there's the Kurdish minority in Iraq - I've heard some horrible stories about the way some of them treat another minority, the Turkomans.

Of all the oppressed people in the Middle East, those most widely and consistently denied their rights are women. Whether they happen to be more or less numerous than men is surely beside the point.

Well-intentioned as they may be, Mr Feki's efforts to focus special attention on the region's minorities strike me as the result of some muddled thinking. This is not to suggest that minority rights are necessarily unimportant; it is vital to protect them, for example, in a democratic countries.

In democracies, the will of the majority is supreme and so we need safeguards to ensure that the majority does not abuse its position by oppressing minorities. In most of the Middle East, though, with only a very limited measure of democracy, minorities and majorities are largely irrelevant: prejudice, discrimination, intolerance and bigotry are rife, full stop.

A couple of months ago I was in the Middle East, researching this problem for a book that I am writing and two points in particular stood out.

One is that very few people grasp the concept of diversity. Difference - whether ethnic, religious, cultural or sexual - is viewed as an embarrassment and something you keep quiet about. The roots of this attitude lie deep in the history and culture but it's a far cry from the idea, now prevalent in the west, that diversity is valuable and enriches a society rather than weakening it.

The second point is that the principle of equality - equal rights, equality before the law, equality of opportunity, etc - has not really been taken on board either. "It's not that people haven't heard of these concepts," Nadime Houry, a researcher for Human Rights Watch told me when I met him in Lebanon. He explained:

Most laws - and [Arab] constitutions as well - are framed in a way [that says] "we are against discrimination, we are for equality and all citizens are born equal" – but all these slogans ring hollow when you look at them more closely ... Even within society the sense of equality or non-discrimination is absent. It's not just the state that is the culprit here. Most examples of discrimination are between people, but no one is really going to take a strong stand to push for that equality.

In Cairo, Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, echoed this view. "People can immediately spot injustice and stand up for the oppressed," he said, "but it's not the same thing as discrimination or inequality. They don't spot inequality as easily. They can see why torture is wrong, why the imprisonment of a journalist or a political activist is wrong. They see the abuse. But just because someone is not getting exactly the same treatment as another person is not as shocking to their moral system as simple abuse."

A large part of the problem, he said, is the sheer pervasiveness of injustice and inequality. "It affects everyone almost, apart from the lucky few – so it becomes a matter of 'why them?'

"Another part of the problem," he continued, "is that it's all a power game, so a middle-class middle-aged civil servant in the ministry of transport who is working in inhuman conditions and gets very poor treatment from his superiors would take this out on his wife or his children or his Coptic neighbour. This sense of injustice gets exercised in different ways. In a sea of victims it's really hard to find one victim and to make a big case about their victimhood."