Difficulties faced by many in the West in understanding Islamic culture proved a powerful theme at this year's 7th International Literature Festival in Berlin. Prominent writers, academics and sociologists deluged into Berlin, some of them seemingly desperate to convince sceptical audiences that talk of a clash of cultures and religions was nonsense.
In the festival's "Reflections" part of the programme, four separate events were devoted to a mix of themes ranging from "Women in Islamic societies" and "Dreams in Islam," to "Borders of Tolerance" and "Islam in Europe."
"The dramatic course of events at the start of the millennium makes it clear that the need for resolution and explanation in the world is still growing, even in today's age of information and technology," claimed festival director Ulrich Schreiber.
The Moroccan-born writer and women's activist Fatema Mernissi, who first gained international attention with her 1975-published book, "Beyond the Veil" was one of the speakers at the festival who stirred controversy.
Mernissi spoke of a gulf between Muslim and western culture, when pointing out one did not differentiate between dreams and reality in the Islamic world, and saying that Muslim women bore three times more children than their Western counterparts - a fact, she seemed to hint, that might explain why the West feared Islam.
The writer who has long pleaded in her publications for a better understanding between Islam and the West, faced an uphill battle convincing her audience, more so, when she pointed to two on-stage placards of coloured carpets dangling from the ceiling.
"Why do carpets fly?" she asked, smiling. When the audience remained mute, she said this was because in the Islamic world "dreams in the form of symbols were woven into them."
This answer did not impress one woman in the audience who riposted it was absurd of the writer to talk of flying carpets without once mentioning the so-called "flying dream" of Mohammed Atta who had crashed a hijacked plane into New York's twin towers in 200l.
The festival's "Reflections" section has existed since 2002, when it was developed to mark the first anniversary of the events of 9/ll, sparking discussions about the status of women in Islamic cultures.
At the "Islam: Borders of Tolerance" lecture, Dutch writers Ian Buruma and Hans Maarten van den Brink described the divisions and tensions created in Holland after the murder by extremists of the writer-filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November 2004.
It was, Buruma said, noting Holland's large number of Muslim citizens, not up to government politicians to discuss the problems in Islam. Just as it would be strange if a leftist US congressman began talking about secret forms of Christianity in US society. "It's just not their business," he said.
"It only becomes their business if violence is used, or if in families fathers beat up their wives or do not allow their children to go to school. Then it becomes a legal issue," he added.
"Whom should the West support: moderate Islamists like Tariq Ramadan or Islamic dissidents such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali," asked Pascal Bruckner recently when criticising Ian Buruma's latest book, "Murder in Amsterdam."
His remark led to a swift response, not only from the author himself, but also from best-selling British writer and Oxford don Timothy Garton Ash. "Wake up, the invisible front line runs right through your backyard," warned Garton Ash in a "Guardian" article, made available to visitors at the Festival Thursday.
"Like it nor not, whether you live in London or Oxford, Berlin or Neu-Ulm, Madrid or Rotterdam, you are on that front line - much more than you ever were during the Cold War," stated Garton Ash.
Returning from the US to Europe was to "travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism, but is not, to a continent which is on the front line but still has not fully woken up to the fact," he claimed
Hajo Funke, a professor of politics at the Free University in Berlin, and Berlin literary festival participant, backed up Ash's warnings, claiming the recent arrest of three terrorist suspects, two of them native citizens, in a provincial western German town had caused a ripple of fear and unease in the country.
"There is no margin left for abstraction or scapegoating. Our society, our civilisation has produced these young people. They were corrupted by a foreign ideology, but that ideology filled a vacuum we left," he maintained.
Six years after the September 11 attacks in the US, more than seven in 10 Germans rate Islamic terrorists as more dangerous than the Red Army Faction terrorism of the 1970s in Germany, with one in four feeling personally at risk, according to an Emnid Institute poll published a week ago.
Some 35,000 visitors have attended more than 250 events during the 13-day run of the Festival, with Chilean author Isabel Allende reading from her latest novel, and actress Jane Birkin reciting poems from Serge Gainsbourg and from a cousin, Anno Birkin, who left behind more than 1,000 poems before her death in a tragic car crash, aged 20. The Literature Festival was organised by the Foundation for Art and Politics and the Berliner Festspiele under the patronage of the German Commission for UNESCO.
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