CLAUD COCKBURN once wrote that there was no point in reading newspaper interviews, since the chance that any public figure would tell interesting truths to an audience of several million was vanishingly small. One exception to this rule is when the public figure believes he knows the truth and has no objection to testifying. The trouble then, as Madeleine Bunting discovered, is that it may not be terribly interesting, as seen in her interview in Saturday's Guardian with Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi, the outspoken Egyptian cleric.

To have talked to him at all was an imaginative thing to do, but the interview is a very clear example of the ways in which Muslim clerics and conservative Christians are judged by entirely different criteria. I don't know that this is a bad thing: there's a great deal to be said for trying to understand people on their own terms. But it does underline how different are the terms on which a Muslim and an American fundamentalist can be understood.

The American gets cut less slack because we (or Guardian writers) feel he should know better - that his ignorance has a more wilful quality. Imagine an interview with Judge Roy Moore, the Alabama fundamentalist who was removed from office because he first installed in his courthouse, and then would not remove, a hulk of granite carved with the Ten Commandments as a deliberate defiance of the doctrine of the separation of Church and state. He has just announced that he will run for state governor next year.

If he were to say, as Qaradawi does, that there is sanction for beating your wives, if only lightly and as a last resort, I don't imagine that Western papers would gloss this as opposed by other Christian scholars - however culturally embedded the practice of wife-beating may be in Alabama.

Qaradawi's defence of suicide bombing, provided the victims are Jews, seems to me entirely outrageous: "He maintains that Palestinian suicide bombing is targeted at combatants (something his critics would strongly dispute). ' Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don't mean to, that's OK.'

"These operations are best seen as the weapon of the weak against the powerful. It is a kind of divine justice when the poor, who don't have weapons, are given a weapon which the fully equipped and armed-to-the-teeth powerful don't have - the powerful are not willing to give their lives for any cause."

Curiously, this divine justice doesn't seem to be in operation when the victims aren't Jews. The sheikh has repeatedly condemned the 11 September attacks, on the grounds that "they were not fighting an invasion; they didn't just use their own bodies but those of all the others in the planes. These young men attacked non-combatants - even other Muslims and Arabs - going about their daily lives."

Bunting doesn't seem to have asked him the most difficult question: what is his attitude towards suicide bombers' attacking British troops in Iraq? Perhaps this was felt to be unhelpful: as I remember, he has suggested that they, too, are fighting an invasion, and behaving justly; but if he were to say this again, he couldn't easily visit London and this would deprive us of a lever into Muslim opinion.

Then again, not asking difficult questions can be a trade-off in the cause of asking interesting ones. This interview revealed that three of his daughters have Ph.Ds; one is a nuclear physicist. Combine this with the opulence of his lifestyle, and you can see how religion remains the best route up for poor clever boys and their families in the Arab world.

I WONDER how Dr Williams would have got on had he been born an Egyptian Muslim. What sort of a Muslim would he have been? None of the newspapers sent anyone to Cairo to cover his visit there, which is rather a shame. All the coverage seems to have relied on the Reuters correspondent. So we know some of what was said, but very little of what was meant. The Telegraph reported that "Conservative Anglican leaders issued one of their strongest condemnations yet of their liberal opponents, as divisions over homosexuality deepened yesterday.

"The leaders, who represent about two-thirds of the worldwide Church, said they were united in their resolve to force the expulsion of the Americans and Canadians if they did not reverse their policies on homosexuals." This is certainly true, but hardly news.

The Times was more excited by the news that Dr Williams had denounced cultural imperialism: "He said: 'In all sorts of ways the Church over the centuries has lent itself to the error, indeed the sin, of trying to make cultural captives, whether it is the mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to the remote parts of the mission field . . . the shadow of the British Empire that hangs over our own Communion or the export of American values and styles to the whole world.'"

I can't work out whether this is a deliberate irony or not, considering that the whole "Global South" racket is an attempt to impose the culture of Alabama or Lagos on the rest of us.