This delightful swipe at TV news making by Charlie Brooker garnered 600,000 hits on YouTube in three days. Enjoy!

Before Lawrence Wright published his epic Looming Tower, about the individuals and events that led to September 11, he found a way into Saudi Arabia as a newspaper editor—after initial attempts to enter the country had failed. He wrote about his time there in a New Yorker article (titled ‘The Kingdom of Silence’. His time here was important for the perspective it provided on the country, and how it shaped people who changed the world. I had long wanted to understand how he reported in West Asia, a place where questions are discouraged, and government press releases are taken to be fact. Goes without saying he didn’t have much time; the interview lasted 15 minutes.

When you were there as an editor, and you had these reporters under you, did you feel like they were ready to look at the world in a different way?

I felt that my reporters were at a transitional point in Saudi history. They were very modern in their ways. And because they worked at an English-speaking newspaper, they were more oriented towards the West than most Saudis. But they were also surprisingly traditional. One of the things that surprised me was that when I went back to Saudi Arabia a couple of years later, when they had gotten a little older, they had become even more conservative. In fact, some of my male reporters were opposed to women driving, which surprised me, because they had not been this way when they were my reporters. As they got older, they adopted more traditional Saudi views. So even though I still see them as being a transitional generation, I think the transition’s going to take a long time.

Was what you experienced with them at the paper an extreme form of what happens in West Asian media?

Well, I don’t want to lump all the Arab countries together. The Arab media is an interesting study by itself. Saudi Arabia had extremely restricted media until the first Gulf War. They had only two government channels, and they restricted everything else. But suddenly they had this war on their border, and one day, without explanation, they had to let CNN come on television, without any announcement at all. And this was a way of alerting people to what was happening. The official media couldn’t even admit it. And once satellite media was allowed to broadcast, it liberated a lot of the print media, because people could see something on television, and that allowed newspapers to write about it. This doesn’t mean that the press in Saudi Arabia or much of the Arab world is free. It’s ironic, because you can express opinions… the newspapers are almost like the blogosphere. You can say what you want, but the government is very careful in Saudi Arabia to limit access to facts. Facts are dangerous; opinions are not.

That’s surprising, because one assumes that ideas are dangerous things, and so opinions would be suppressed…

Yeah.

…But it’s the other way round. Why do you think that happens?

Well, as long as there are opinions, there’s a level of abstraction about it. Or instance, one of the stories I was working on with my reporters was about expat workers. There was a taxi company that had its own jail. And they would bring in workers mainly from the subcontinent who thought they were getting one job and were given another. In some cases they couldn’t even drive. Yet suddenly they were chauffeurs and taxi drivers and they were trapped there. Their papers were seized, and so on. And if they rebelled, the owner of the taxi company would put them in his private jail. Now, I thought that was a big story. But we weren’t allowed to publish it. Now you could say in an opinion piece, in an editorial, ‘it’s shameful, the way expat workers are treated’. But if you were to expose a Saudi businessman who physically abused his workers and failed to pay them and then imprisoned them when they try to escape and get their freedom, that’s a different matter. That, I think, is the crucial difference.

Given your experience as an editor, are you satisfied with the coverage coming out of a place like Dubai?

No. Not entirely. I had an editor of one of the largest Arab-language papers in the world make a confession to me. He said, ‘There will always be a footnote to my name, because we never wrote about the hijackers. I’m ashamed of it’. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you?’ And he said, ‘I met this Egyptian writer very briefly, he disappeared. He wrote against the government, and he was a satirist. He made fun of the government. One day he disappeared, and he’s never been found’. My friend said, ‘I don’t want to be that guy. Not because he was killed. I’m used to death threats and all that. But nobody ever speaks of him. His absence has gone unremarked.’

That, I think, is still a reality in the Arab world. Somebody can be eliminated, and it’s just a lesson that chills the entire press, including the editor of a very important paper in the Arab world.

What about you? Is it safe for you to go back to the Arab world, given all that you’ve reported there?

I never really think about those things. How do you know whether you’re safe or not? You just don’t know. I’ve always been treated pretty well, and so I assume that everybody loves me. I don’t want to succumb to paranoia, and I have a ton of friends in the Arab world, so I think that attitude serves me well. I’m going there in good faith, and I hope that people can see that.

How did you manage to stay under the radar there? Because word tends to get around.

I know. But it was a little mysterious to me. They wouldn’t let me in as a reporter…

That was pretty amazing. That you thought of getting in as an editor.

I just had to get in. I just had to get in. And so I started looking for a job, and I was really lucky that a friend of mine had been the professor of the editor of the Saudi Gazette and she knew that he was looking for someone to train his reporters. And I was like ‘wow, that’s it. That’s perfect!’ I wasn’t sure that it was actually going to happen up until the last minute. As soon as I got the visa, I just got on the plane. It was perfect for me because I was much more a part of the fabric of society, and secondly, the minister for information didn’t know that I was there. I was an expat worker beneath notice, and it gave me a tremendous amount of freedom, even though the newspaper was Prince Naif’s. I was inside his own tent, and he wasn’t really paying attention to me.

So your name wasn’t on the masthead.

Nope. There were several reporters who wanted to write about me, but I didn’t really want to call any attention to myself.

Louis de Bernières’ afternoon session with Sunil Sethi was interesting because Bernieres was so singleminded about it. Frequently interrupted by Sethi, he would invariably recover and rephrase the answers the questions demanded. Praise be for that. Here’s Bernières in his own words:

On the nationality of his stories. I always have a problem with seeing my country as at all interesting. And that’s one reason why I tend to set my stories abroad. I never seem to find any stories at home. One day I went to a book festival in France, and I met an artist called Jacques, and he said to me, ‘I love Great Britain’. I asked ‘why?’ He said, ‘Because it’s so exotic!’ He said, ‘wherever I go in Europe—France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany—they all seem to me the same. [But] Great Britain is an immense lunatic asylum.’

On why we’re all unhinged. I have my own theories about why we’re all unhinged. We develop strong attachments to ideas and thoughts that are completely implausible. There is nothing more absurd than nationalism, is there? But you could just flick a switch and become a nationalist. The moment some foreigner says something negative about your country, you become really angry, even though you really agree with them.

On religion. The wonderful thing about religion is that it makes you feel at home in the world. But it also sets you up with a whole lot of instant enemies.

On Ataturk. I learned that you couldn’t satirise him because he wasn’t remotely ridiculous. There wasn’t really anything lunatic about him… I once vaguely angered a Turkish friend of mine by saying they should replace the Prophet with Ataturk. He was the only dictator in the history of the world who wanted his country to get smaller. He’s also the only dictator in the world who set up his own opposition party, and when it didn’t oppose him effectively, he abolished it and established another.

On the problem with Latin America. …my publishers have the rights to all Hispanic-speaking countries, and they absolutely refuse to take into account the fact that in different Latin American countries, different things have different meanings. In one country you could ask for sex, and in another you could use the same words to ask them for a cigarette.

On the cuatro. (he’s very good on the cuatro. Ask anyone who saw him play the instrument today.)

One of the little thrills of this festival is to catch hold of novelists and journalists (the delegate kind) and let rip the questions. And so, when we found ourselves in a room with Alexander McCall Smith, our first instinct was to lock the door from inside (to deter PR reps from reminding us of the time), and settle in for a long conversation. But an agent outside frantically poked at her wrist, and 15 minutes was all we had.

Once we were past how he writes, how much he does, and if he has ever missed a deadline (he hasn’t), the conversation turned to questions of morality. Morality is often in play in Smith’s books, and we wanted to know where it came from.

Smith didn’t go to church very much. But he has a keen interest in spirituality. “I have a very broad theology. In the sense that I think having a spiritual dimension to one’s life is very important, but I think that one can find that in all sorts of ways. Some people find it through music, poetry or religion. What I find depressing is that some people have put the spiritual out of their life. That I find rather narrow and sad in a way.”

He’s intrigued by the evolution of agony columns from being forums where people could cry their heart out to places where people question the little things in life. “I’m very interested in ethics. I’m interested in moral philosophy. I think the question of how we lead our lives is interesting for most of us. It’s significant that some newspapers used to have agony aunts and now have agony philosophers. I think people find it fascinating to think about the ordinary implications of life. How we treat our friends, and when, if ever, it is alright to lie. These are tiny problems that are of intense interest to people, and that comes out in these books. Dalhousie (He’s currently working on the seventh of the Isabel Dalhousie mystery series) has a lot of those issues. It’s also about her relationship with a younger man, which raises [those] issues for her. And she’s interested in when you can say, when people come in contact with us, that your problems are my problems.”

There are worlds between Botswana and Edinburgh, where Smith’s protagonists operate. And while there’s a strong sense of morality in both places, his characters tackle it in different ways. Isabel Dalhousie, for instance, is a trained philosopher, while Mma Ramotswe hasn’t had much of a formal education. “Dalhousie looks at things as a trained philosopher would. Mma Ramotswe would have been educated to, say, 15 or something like that. But she often reaches the right solution based on her intuitive understanding. The code of morality is very important in Botswana. Because it was a moral system based on respect for others. And it played down selfishness. And that was one of the interesting things about African societies—that attitude to sharing, which is very, very fine.”

The morning was dominated by Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright and Max Rodenbeck’s discussion on the decline of Al Qaeda. “There are as many people here as there are left in Al Qaeda,” Coll said at one point. Wright saw the humor in the group’s predicament as it lost influence steadily on either side of September 11, 2001. He mimicked the likely panic they felt when their work was threatened by conspiracy theories in the aftermath. “They were like, ‘no, no! We did it! We’re responsible!’” Describing their declining influence and the tiny measures the group was taking to stay relevant, Coll reasoned that they could only pass on bomb-making skills for so long before somebody thought they were a liability and ousted them. It’s like having a manufacturing partner in China, Coll said. Once you tell them how you did it, you’re out.

“Al Qaeda is failing today,” Coll said. “The political claims that AQ made are just as resonant now as they were back then, but people are done with Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wanted to be the vanguard of a revolution 20 years ago. Now they’re nowhere. It’s ambitions have come to a roadblock. Is that the end? I hope so. But as long as you have the spore of AQ intact, it’s a continuing danger. It will probably find new ways [of announcing itself].

Asked to describe Gaza’s importance, where he recently spent three weeks during a total lockdown by the Israelis, Wright said, “Well, it’s important to Bin Laden,” before talking about why Al Qaeda wasn’t important to the Palestinians. “He mentions Palestine in nearly all his speeches because it draws upon the anger of the Muslim world. But excluding Abu Zubeida, there are no Palestinians in Al Qaeda. Because it doesn’t offer a solution to their problems.”

Later in the discussion, Basharat Peer, who made for an excellent moderator, asked Coll if he was saying that Al Qaeda was of no value any more to other groups. Coll replied, “Their value is in their brand.” The group’s media operations churn out 150-200 finished videos each year, according to Coll. He spoke about the way AQ and especially the Taliban had evolved. “The Taliban’s media operations are many orders greater than that [of Al Qaeda’s]. There was a great scene in Lawrence’s book at Bin Laden’s son wedding, in 2000, when he finds Taliban guests and he really wants a family video tape of it, but he’s afraid that the Taliban guests will see him using a video camera, so he actually has someone shooting it hiding a camera under a robe. That’s where the Taliban were. And 10 years later, they’re the most prolific video-laptop-generated media operation in the borderlands.”

Basharat Peer (right) with Lawrence Wright

The festival has seen some discussions that seemed promising at first go awry because the moderators were ineffective or plain inattentive. One moderator continued to refer to both her panelists as novelists, even after she was made aware by one of them that the book was not a novel, but historical non-fiction. Another used the platform to advertise his publication’s achievements for a quarter of the speaking time. Basharat Peer, however, was a masterstroke. While he spoke softly and haltingly, his questions were clear, direct and relevant, and they took the discussion forward. This was in stark contrast to last evening, when a discussion hosted by Barkha Dutt stood no chance against the argument that the Kindle could not be taken to the bathroom and that it did not smell like a book.