Her feminism comes from experience. She has described her own genital mutilation and the botched genital mutilation of her sister, her horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, their faces hidden by veils and their black robes hanging so shapelessly that you had to see which way their shoes were pointing to know which way they were looking. She has written of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland, of the terrors of refugee existence and the double terrors of refugee existence for women. "All these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today," says Berman. "It is a visceral anger at oppression...You do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the ques-tion of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer."

Liberals hated her for her moral clarity. Buruma and Garton Ash denounced her for being crude, zealous, strident, humourless, ineffective and contemptuous of others. She was an "Enlightenment fundamentalist", as bigoted in her insistence that women should not be stoned to death as those Islamist fundamentalists who insisted that they should.

Parallels with the 20th century struck me on every page. Susan Sontag, a former president of American PEN who defended Rushdie with a vigour her successors cannot match, scandalised leftish New Yorkers when she addressed a town hall meeting as the Soviet empire was starting to crumble under pressure from Poland's Solidarity trade union. Imagine, she told the assembled fellow-travellers as she tried to dissolve their illusions, "the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only the Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of communism? There's no doubt it would have been the Reader's Digest reader."

Berman pays an unwitting tribute to Sontag when he concludes by noticing that Garton Ash had patronised Hirsi Ali in the New York Review of Books by implying that the attention she received owed more to her striking beauty than the quality of her thought. Why, Garton Ash snickered, Glamour magazine had made her its "hero of the month".

He left an open goal and Berman tapped the ball into the net. "I can't help observing that Glamour magazine nowadays offers a more reliable guide to liberal principles than the New York Review of Books," he replied.