Saturday 10pm: more than 500 people hung around in the cold of the Hay Festival for a round table discussion about radical Islam.
The question under discussion: Is Islam incompatible with democracy? The chairman, Martin Bright, New Statesman political editor, starting by decreeing the question daft. He declared his hand by reminding the audience of his many writings attacking the Muslim Council of Britain and drawing attention not just to the dangers of Islamism in the UK, but the government's previous acquiescence - in his view - in the face of it. The issue, Bright and others noted, was not Islam per se but political Islam, in other words the right or demand of that religion, or any religion, to dictate the political agenda in any country.
Bright was joined in his endeavours by Michael Gove, Conservative MP and author of Celsius 7/7, who repeated his warnings of the threats posed not just by al-Qaida, but by the Muslim Brotherhood and groups beyond. Ziauddin Sardar, who in his NS columns and television documentaries has struck courageous positions against militant Islam, nevertheless pointed out to Gove that radicalism Islam has gained in popularity thanks in large part to US support for corrupt governments as in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
He noted that countries such as Indonesia, freed from the American-backed Suharto regime, were flourishing democracies with Islamic majorities. The fruitiest exchanges came between two Palestinian speakers. Novelist Samir el-Youssef declared that any monotheistic religion, particularly Islam, was per se incompatible with freedom and democracy. He sought to shout down each and every attempt by Dr Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for Hamas and now the Palestinian government, who asserted that Hamas was not seeking to impose religious law.
The most powerful intervention was saved for last. Tahmima Anam, a Bangladeshi writer and journalist, who pointed out that in her country the two main parties were defiantly non-religious, but that even they were increasingly worries about the growing influence of radical activism. Anam cited the Anxiety of Influence, where Islam and democracy are operating in tense competition. Anxiety was perhaps the overriding theme of the Muslim-dominated podium, peppered with no little fear on the part of Sardar and el-Youssef. But I - and I think most of the audience - took away a strong sense of the vitality of the debate, the variety of the examples cited from Pakistan to Indonesia to Morocco, and also a sense that among writers, thinkers and politicians a debate that had been regarded as both sterile and ultra-sensitive was now, at least in this country, more open as it has ever been, and more determined to untangle difficult truths from prejudice.
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