No easy answers

An unsettling interview with Moazzam Begg, the British Muslim held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay for three years, and with his father Azmat, began with the haunting cry of the muezzin as it rang out across a cityscape, unnamed and unidentifiable, and the clashing of heavy iron gates being shut. Two sounds that perhaps sum up what’s been happening in the world since the events of September 2001.

British Muslims, Father and Son (Radio 4, Monday) gave us a refreshingly frank account of Begg’s life before and after his ‘extrajudicial’ imprisonment. He was seized one night in Islamabad, where he was living with his young family, after he answered the door to a group of men who pushed a gun to his head, forced him to his knees, shackled his hands and legs, ‘hooded his head’ and carried him off to three years of incarceration in a converted sea container. He was under suspicion as a British Muslim whose passport revealed he had visited all the major war zones in which the Muslim world had been under attack — Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya — and on several occasions.