The bank holiday weekend is over, and Hay breathes a sigh of relief, writes Clemency Burton-Hill.
Yet if things feel a bit more chilled out on site today, this is probably deceptive - there are still thousands of people flocking to events whose topics are as penetrating as ever.
Today, for example, you could catch films on Guantanamo and the Bradford Riots, John Stevens discussing terrorism and shoot-to-kill, a scientist analysing the molecules within us that make us commit suicide, a British General reporting on his regiment's frontline tour of Iraq - and at least two highly sophisticated discussions on Islam. Bracing myself, I opt for the latter.
"Books that deal with Islam, western attitudes to Islam and Muslim attitudes towards the West are in publishing terms sexy", announces Robert Irwin, here to discuss his controversial book For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. Calling our attention to headscarves and hijabs, cartoons, politics, nuclear power and terrorism, he points out (somewhat unnecessarily) that "these days, Muslims are always in the news", before going on to explain that "overarching such incidents and controversies is a grander, more theoretical debate about whether there is or will be a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West."
The old clash-of-civilisations chestnut has come up a lot at this year's Hay. On Saturday we had young Iranian-American academic Reza Aslan discussing his theory of the Islamic Reformation and arguing (very cogently) that any "clash" lies within Islam itself, rather than between it and the West. The next day we watched two young females, journalist Asne Seierstadt and academic Elif Shafak, explore the position of women in the Middle East and examine how this position is liable to be (mis)interpreted in the two supposedly clashing cultures. In addition to Irwin, today's offerings include Barnaby Rogerson and Charles Allen in conversation about their own Orientalist works, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhummad: The Two Paths of Islam, and God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad,
All three authors approach certain pertinent questions about the nature of Islam and its relation to both itself and the West from diverse perspectives, but are united in their focus on historical and academic context. While Allen takes us back to the emergence of violent Wahhabism in the 1740s, Rogerson, in his exploration of the origins and implications of the Sunni-Shia divide, even goes so far as to say that he has deliberately "kept contemporary politics out of the book". Irwin, meanwhile, in what amounts to a compelling but vitriolic critique on Edward Said's Orientalism - a "wicked" work of "malignant charlatanry" - issues a clarion call for a new scholarly tradition which will wrest Orientalism back from those who use it, as he claims Said did, as a spurious weapon against western imperialism.
It's pretty unrelentingly stuff, but even with a hangover and two hours' sleep (thanks to bank holiday festivities that carried on long into the night), completely riveting. Hay at its challenging best.
