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. 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.
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