I’m in the most obscure tent in Charlotte Square to hear from two distinguished authors of the Arabic world: Tahar Ben Jelloun, the prolific writer exiled from Morocco who has lived in France since the early 1970s, and Elias Khoury from Lebanon.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, with translator Vineet Lal, reads first from his novel A Palace in the Old Village – a fable about a character terrorized by his own retirement. The character, he tells us, has never had time to contemplate his own future and has lost all the points of reference that his working life provided. He builds his dream house and waits in an armchair, for his adult children who never join him.

Elias Khoury’s novel As Though She Were Sleeping combines dreams and reality in a character who loses the ability to tell the difference between her waking and sleeping life. His character is a woman who worries that her child will be killed by her father, symbolic, Khoury tells us, of Palestine. He speaks more on the subject of politics than his novel, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The work of both writers spans geography and religion, and audience questions focus on these things. The Arab Spring, Khoury tells us, began in Palestine, which he describes as being in deepening crisis. As he sees it, the Arab Spring is evidence that freedom and dignity are universal needs. He’s forthright in his views on Israeli weapons and the double-standard applied to Muslim countries.

Jelloun describes religion in Morocco – including his early experiences of daily prayers and ablutions in a house with no heat or running water, and his father’s assertion that respecting elders and helping poor people is more important that prayer. The religion developed differently in Morocco, he tells us, than in other parts of the world, but this doesn’t mean that the country is immune to extremism or global events. He describes Islam as being part of a political and cultural identity for immigrants in the west.

A question from an audience member on the increasing wearing of veils amongst Muslim women goes a bit awry; suggestions that in a cultural context women are taken more seriously when veiled apparently don’t answer the question, nor the more allegorical idea that in a crisis a whole culture is veiled, sparking a heated debate between an audience member and Khoury as the event is closing.

Stories, we’re told, mirror not reality but other stories… so to understand a story we must read the one that comes after.