Banned Arab Intellectuals Speak Out in Granada

Hay Festival Alhambra Provides the Forum

Granada is hosting an edition of the Hay Festival this week. This event started out as a modest book festival in the Welsh town of Hay on Wye in 1988, but has since developed into a major itinerant international cultural event. This year’s Granada version includes talks by some distinguished spokesmen for the Arab/Muslim cause, so Maureen and I went down to hear what they had to say.

The first speaker was the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti, a native of Ramallah. Today Barghouti is a tall, impeccably-dressed, white-haired elder poet/statesman, an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. He was a young man finishing an English literature degree in Cairo when the 1967 Six Day War broke out. Unable to return to his homeland Barghouti spent the next 30 years in a cruel exile which began in Egypt. But on the occasion of Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977, Barghouti was deported and separated from his wife (the novelist and university professor, Radwa Ashour) and only child for the better part of 17 years. During this time he lived mainly in Budapest, where he was Palestinian cultural attaché and PLO representative in the World Federation of Democratic Youth.