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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. It was now a dispute between Islam and Judaeo-Christianity. But no one minded. The room was eager to slug it out on just that territory.
The French academic Tariq Ramadan gave a spirited rebuttal of Aaronovitch.
Ramadan has a Jose Mourinho-like knack for coining memorable phrases. ‘Implicit in your talk is that Islam is the problem,’ he said. And he accused Aaronovitch of generalising. ‘From one story we make a civilisation? Unfair! Unjust! Dangerous!’ He surprised us with a list of Islamic mediaeval thinkers who had espoused the cause of free debate. We struggled to recognise their names. And that was the point. Western history is too blinkered and exclusive to admit the tradition of liberal Islam. He told us that our so-called ‘superiority’ is inspired by a fear of losing our special identity. ‘We select the past to build a new “we”’, he thundered. And we — the we he meant — shuddered as we digested this slogan. Instead of ‘superior’, we felt suddenly biased, parochial and ill-informed.
Then up stood Douglas Murray, director of the Centre for Social Cohesion. The youngest of the speakers, Murray was easily the most adept and relaxed. Glancing only occasionally at his notes, he gave a searching, witty and brilliantly informal speech in which he dissected his opponents’ arguments. Unpicking the motion and its troublesome word ‘assert’, he defused its imperialist flavour. ‘Our superiority need not be asserted violently.’ He reiterated a point made by David Aaronovitch about the crisis of Abu Ghraib. Ultimately the discovery that America had committed torture reaffirmed liberal values. ‘Lynndie England was found guilty,’ Murray said, ‘in the West. By the West. For the West.’
Closing for the opposition, the travel writer William Dalrymple raked up the ashes of the West’s guilty past. He gave a list of races annihilated by colonial adventurers — Tasmanians, Incas, Caribs, Apaches — and suggested that ‘the tradition of colonial genocide paved the way for the Holocaust’. In a rowdy conclusion he urged the audience to stand up against ‘the neocons and the neo-lefties’. Noisy approval greeted him. Chairman Edward Lucas, inviting questions from the floor, conducted the ensuing discussion with icy wit and with a note of asperity that bordered, very pleasingly, on impatience. Brevity was encouraged. Windbaggery punctured. The best of the exchanges was Murray’s answer to Dalrymple’s second attempt to blame cultural divisions on our colonial past. ‘This is masochism,’ said Murray, ‘and it’s being offered to you by a sadist.’ Huge laughter. The votes were counted and the motion was carried by 465 to 264. The winning majority howled with pleasure when Ibn Warraq summed up the debate: ‘I don’t want to live in a society where I get stoned for committing adultery. I want to live in a society where I get stoned. And then commit adultery.’
Before: For the motion 313; Against the motion 221; Don’t Know 207
After: For the motion 465; Against the motion 264; Don’t Know 18
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