The Guardian took a double-decker Routemaster bus to Glastonbury last weekend, in the hope that some of the stars of the festival would hop aboard between (or, more likely, during) cloudbursts and provide the paper with some free copy.

Sir Paul McCartney, the English National Opera and the now apparently drug-free Gallagher brothers all forgot their bus passes. But there were still more than enough sort-of-star visitors popping by to justify the expenditure on the Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and limitless supplies of loo paper.

(It's always a good festival crowdpuller, that last one. I once had the inspired idea of giving away a free toilet roll with every copy of the New Statesman we sold at Glastonbury. We got through around a thousand - and some of the purchasers were even compos mentis enough to know which one to read and which one to use for other purposes.)

One of the Guardian bus passengers was Michael Franti, now with Spearhead and formerly with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (which is possibly the only band in British music history ever to have insisted to its advertising agency that its records must be advertised in a political weekly).

Franti is not long back from Baghdad. He told the Guardian: "I wanted to go there and see first hand what was happening. I just took my guitar and went over there. I said, 'I want a tourist visa', and they just looked at me like, 'Yo maan, if you're stupid enough to come here, just come on in!'"

The way Franti tells it, he walked the streets of Baghdad, playing for anyone who would listen. "I wrote a song with just one word, 'habibi'. Habibi means, like, sweetheart, and it's the thing that everyone says, like 'Yo dude, what's up?'" he explains. "I sang it on the streets, and crowds would gather round and just with that one word people would open their hearts up."

A few years ago, I travelled with a sound system across southern Africa from Cape Town to Lusaka, putting on impromptu "raves" (for want of a better word) at various open-air venues en route. So I understand the power of music to bring together the most unlikely participants in the most improbable places.

Even so, the notion of playing in Baghdad at the moment seems to be stretching the old hippie festival ethic to its limits. Some local Christians once erected a huge wooden cross on the ridge overlooking the Glastonbury festival site in a kind of protest against the pagan goings-on in the valley below. The mind boggles at how the imams and ayatollahs of unreconstructed Islam might react to even a shadow of this bacchanalian festivity.

The Guardian dipped the tiniest of toes into this gaping cultural divide by taking its Iraqi columnist, Ghaith Abdul Ahad, along for the ride to Glastonbury this year. Ahad had never even been to Britain before, let alone a gathering along such lines as these. So culture shock was to be expected, and shock was what he got.

But it wasn't the open sexuality, the drug-taking, the drunkenness, or any of the other works of Satan that are haram, or forbidden, to Muslims that constituted the biggest shock. Rather, according to Ahad, "The shock came from the actual feeling of the festival, from seeing so many people together in one place, enjoying themselves despite the amazing amount of mud and rain."

For someone who had previously experienced only two kinds of festival - the stage-managed "celebrations" of Saddam and all his works, or the self-flagellating processions of the great Shia ceremonies - the "true sense of having fun", of simply enjoying oneselves, was something new.

Ahad makes what I can only assume to be a tongue-in-cheek suggestion to take Glastonbury to Iraq. It would, he says, "be a great opportunity for all those organisations that usually set up tents and hand flyers to people half-drunk talking about the poverty in the world to do the same thing in a place where poverty and hunger is the norm".

As indeed it would. But is it - could it ever be - compatible with unreconstructed Islam? Or, for that matter, with any other fundamentalist religious doctrine that seeks not only that its own adherents stick to its particular version of the "straight and narrow" but that everyone else does also?

Those of us of the Bacchanalian tendency - which, judging by the continuing success of Glastonbury, now stretches well into the British mainstream - have no problem with the essential arts of compromise that allow us to indulge our passions while others keep theirs in check. Can the same be said of those who have a different take on faith and pleasure?