Given the furore over recent weeks about Martin Amis’s comments on the legitimacy of harassment of Muslims, I thought a little trip to Manchester University’s Whitworth Hall to hear him battle it out with Terry Eagleton might be, well, interesting shall we say.

Unfortunately, Eagleton couldn’t make it so we’re left with only Maureen Freely and Ed Husain to debate with Amis. But that’ll do for me.

The train left Liverpool at 4:14pm. Eventful journey – well, eventful start to the journey anyway. It’s an express train and just as I’m walking on the carriage, a group of girls are getting up from their seats. Apparently, the train doesn’t stop where they’re going so off they get, leaving a prized table seat free for me and an Asian girl with a hijab on. She starts talking to me. “Oh bollocks,” I’m thinking, “I wanted to read my magazine.” She takes the hint.

Then she starts praying.

I got a definite urge, wouldn’t you have it, to leave her to her public displays of Islam and move to another carriage. What if she blows me up? Wouldn’t that be a cruel irony – the lefty liberal on his way to a debate on terrorism being murdered by a terrorist before he can speak in her defence. I move seats.

It’s only later, when I come to write this, that I reflect on this event and wonder what it says about me, what it says about my world, and what it says about Martin Amis. My action in moving seats to the next carriage – was it done through racism? rationalism? prejudice? or empiricism?

I don’t know.

I can make an argument either way, sure. But instinctively… Instinctively, I just don’t know. Maybe days of soul-searching will follow. Maybe I’ll try not to think about it. Maybe I’ll write a blog post and add soul-bearing to soul-searching.

So anyway, I get to the venue just before half six. I’m sitting next to a typical student – well, what I assume to be a typical student anyway. Overconfident, loud, arrogant and talking about alcohol consumption with someone called Adrian. To be honest, I can’t truly say if the attendance is remarkable or not – there’s a few hundred here I think, quite possibly representative of the make-up of Manchester students, quite possibly not.

Then they start. Freely, Amis and Husain walk on and the crowd shush instantly. Husain kicks things off – Islam isn’t Islamism. Islam is a faith, Islamism an ideology. An ideology based on Marxism, apparently. Maududi and Qtub’s writings have helped create this ideology, by ignoring traditional Islamic contexts.

Amis is up next. No messing about, he mentions 9/11 in his first sentence. His second sentence refers to a recent ICA debate that’s reported extensively elsewhere. Before long, he’s implying hypocritical double standards on the part of the Left, particularly in relation to – you guessed it – the US and Israel. More on this later.

But by God, I want to punch the man for his straw man arguments. But I won’t. Because that’s just an urge I am feeling. Wouldn’t you feel it too?

And then Freely. She spends five minutes being bland and saying not much at all. But even so, she gets across a few points. Terrorism is bad. Neoconservatism is bad. The effects of 9/11 will be felt for decades.

Thanks for that, Maureen.I really wish Terry Eagleton hadn’t pulled out of this debate. He wouldn’t have pulled his punches.

Memories of 9/11, then. Was it a paradigm shift? Or a personal epiphany on a mass scale? Was it payback? Or an attack on reason? Quite possibly it was all of them, and more besides. And yet it will always be so much less than all that as well. It was after all, not 19 million men who did 9/11, not even 19 thousand. But just 19. N-n-n-nineteen. That it was used as an excuse for the new Vietnam is an irony possibly worth mentioning.

And back to Amis. Despite denouncing anti-Americanism earlier, he’s now claiming the UK is “more morally evolved” than the US, as well as being “more morally evolved” than the Taliban. Now, I agree with him on this. But why does he feel the need to preface his comment with an attack on the Left for an apparent moral relativism? – a moral relativism I don’t actually recognise as an accurate characteristic of mainstream Left thinking.

And on to questions from the audience. Shall I ask anything? Shall I? Shall I?

Shall I bollocks.

Palestine comes up first. 9/11 is not an attack on reason after all. It is a rational act by rational people with no voice, no choice and no other way of gaining the world’s attention. Or at least – it is until Husain and Amis hole the argument if not below the water line then at least at sea level.

And then, just when it looks like the Euston lot are being proved right, up pops the worst excesses of the pro-Israel camp. Arguing with Freely, a ranter from the audience accuses her of advocating American bribery of Israel through wanting the US to use its leverage to change Israeli policy. Bribery…? Me neither.

I’m thinking now whether Amis’s comments on moral evolution and the relative lack of it in both the US and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan imply a moral equivalence between the US and the Taliban. I’m sure he’d say they don’t, but I’m sure I wouldn’t be convinced he meant his denial.

On to the future, then, and do universities defend liberal, secular, enlightenment values, or are they breeding grounds for religious fanaticism? Personally, I’d say they are both. Universities are diverse enough to hold both aspects of a superficially contradictory identity together. Unfortunately, the panel don’t have a good grasp on the issue and fudge their comments here.

Very good-natured evening, all told. Only a couple of hecklers and no mention of Amis’s thought experiment concerning disciminatory treatment of Muslims. Until the last question, that is, when Amis is held to account for his by-now infamous comments. It seems he has changed his tune somewhat – he backtracks on wanting discrimination against Muslims, at least until his next urge strikes. But then he backtracks again and claims he still wants Muslims to get their house in order – the implication being that they need a firm helping hand in doing so. All in all, he appears more muddled than ever. Freely has the last word – Amis should do some research next time he gets the urge to make simplistic comments on a complex subject.

And then it’s over. Travelling home, I find myself sitting near a man with a rucksack. He looks a little shifty, he’s sweating and he keeps looking at me then suddenly looking away again.

Should I move seats? No, it’s OK. He’s black, not Asian. So I must have acted rationally earlier on, as my urges were brought on by a non-Asian’s actions too. Hooray, my actions were entirely reasonable. But I did move seats earlier, though. And that definitely wasn’t rational.

Oh dear. It looks like those days of soul-searching I mentioned earlier are about to start after all.

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This is a guest post. Patrick blogs here.

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