You've got to hand it to the organisers of Jewish Book Week. For their opening night, they have landed the intellectual equivalent of Madonna and Britney, or Beckham and Ronaldo - a glorious double header featuring two global stars.
The performers in question are Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri L?vy, the roving philosopher with a film star wife, famed as one of France's best known and most envied men. The book festival billing it like a blockbuster: a Saturday night premiere for a showdown called "Confronting Terror."
Except this will be no ugly wrestling match: there is too much the pair agree on for that. They are both pro-American, or at least anti-anti-American. In the immediate afterburn of 9/11, they both defended the cause of western freedom from those who believed the US had it coming. Neither wanted a clash of civilisations, but if one was coming they seemed ready to take sides.
Their opposition to Islamist extremism has different origins: Rushdie's experience of it was direct. Indeed, the fatwa imposed on him following the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989 provided many with their first glimpse of Islamist radicalism: looking back, the Rushdie affair now looks like an early warning of what was to come later. BHL's experience, on the other hand, has been sought rather than imposed. Like a war correspondent, L?vy has taken himself to the front line of the current clash. He served as a special envoy for Jacques Chirac in Afghanistan and investigated the death of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.
Rushdie and L?vy have something else in common. Both are secular men associated with traditions of faith: L?vy a Jew, Rushdie a Muslim. For L?vy, that is not such an unusual perch to occupy. Ever since the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment, took root in the 18th century, not least in L?vy's own country, there have been Jews affiliated to their people by culture rather than doctrinal belief. Secular Islam strikes our ears as something newer, more unfamiliar and even vaguely oxymoronic.
Indeed, secularism might prove to be the ring where these two heavyweights clash. For Rushdie comes from Britain, where secularism has long translated into multiculturalism: the belief that each different faith should have its piece represented in the national mosaic. L?vy is a man - even a hero - of France whose secularism comes in a more prescribed, more uniform hue. Witness the recent decision by French parliamentarians to ban religious headgear in schools - a prohibition that, incidentally, will affect both Jews and Muslims. That spoke of a society which believes the national picture has to be painted in fixed, centrally imposed colours: red, white and blue. (See Tim King, p64.)
Will Rushdie come out batting for British secularism, insisting that diverse societies work best when the state is neutral and everyone else is free to do their own thing? If he does, he would be able to cite the example of the third country both he and L?vy admire: the US. In the US, it is the state rather than its citizens who must be avowedly secular: no prayer in the classroom, no display of the ten commandments in the Alabama courthouse. Americans themselves can do what they like. It is the school, not the pupils, who are barred from wearing religious symbols.
Will Rushdie cite this as the ideal? If he does, how would he tackle the multiculturalist who says radical Islamists should be allowed to do their own thing in their own corner of the mosaic - even if their own thing is burning copies of The Satanic Verses? Conversely, how would L?vy defend a French move which seems to discriminate against minorities, including his fellow Jews? Won't it cause a rise in the anger and extremism both he and Rushdie fear?
Jewish Book Week runs from 28th February to 7th March. Jonathan Freedland chairs L?vy and Rushdie on 28th February
