The great thing about the Intelligence2 debates is their vitality, pace and compression. A week-long seminar couldn’t have covered as much ground as we traversed in 100 minutes on Tuesday night. The motion ‘We should not be reluctant to assert the superiority of Western values’ was proposed by the author Ibn Warraq. He contrasted the West’s openness and flexibility with the ossified ‘closed book’ culture of Islam. ‘Easterners flock to collect their degrees from Oxbridge, Harvard and the Sorbonne,’ he said. Traffic in the other direction is minimal. Rejecting the ‘mind-numbing certainties’ of Islam in favour of the ‘liberating doubt’ of Bertrand Russell, he asked us if Islam would tolerate an equivalent of The Life of Brian.
Opposing the motion, Charles Glass, a distinguished American war correspondent, made an urbane, ironic speech in which he pretended to side with his opponents. ‘Aren’t we jolly lucky to be Western and to be superior to those not fortunate enough to share our values?’ He reminded us that the explorer Magellan, on arriving in Madras, ordered the extermination of all the city’s Jews and Muslims. Glass linked this to later atrocities committed by Europeans and Americans. ‘A culture that created two world wars should be wary of assuming its superiority.’ He invoked Vietnam and Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.
Times columnist David Aaronovitch lighted on Iran and painted a vivid and appalling picture of its misogynistic legal system. Teenage girls are often subjected to stoning for ‘crimes against chastity’, i.e. being alone with a boy. A young woman recently imprisoned on such charges was raped by her jailer. Both were convicted of adultery. The man, 52, was flogged. The girl, 16, was hanged. These details subtly refined the terms of the debate.
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