In October 2009, the hitherto most heated row over the face veil (niqab) broke out in Egypt after the Shaykh al-Azhar had ordered a school girl to remove her veil and humiliated her in public. On Oct. 20, 2009, the pan-Arab satellite TV station al-Jazeera's famous (and notorious) talk show "al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis" hosted a debate on what the face veil had to do with Islam. Participants were the Syrian Islamist preacher Abd al-Rahman Kuki and the Egyptian director of the Jordanian-based Arab Institute for Research and Strategic Studies, Abd al-Rahim Ali. Both used very strong language to mark their points, and Kuki was arrested upon his return to Syria and sentenced to one year imprisonment in February 2010 for having exposed Syria and the Syrian president to derogation and stirred up sectarian chauvinism; he was set free on presidential pardon a week later. Al-Ittijah al-Mu'akis is known for its high pitch, and sometimes blamed for having contributed to lowering the standards of debate on Arabic media by allowing participants to abandon measured discussion and engage in populist mud-slinging. To bemoan the decline of the culture of debate in the Arab world appears to be a fashionable topos recently; it was a theme in the niqob debate itself, and in January 2010 the BBC Arabic service made it a focus in its socio-cultural program BBC Xtra. In my presentation, I give examples from a micro-analysis of the rhetorical and linguistic strategies employed by the participants. This includes not only the formal arguments made pro and contra the niqlb. Much of the debate was highly emotionally loaded, and I attempt to point out core areas of emotional concern for the two opponents. I have tagged and analyzed the debate regarding: o arguments made / debated / raised but not completed o which arguments do not get a response, are ignored / by-passed o what means are used to bypass an argument o MSA / colloquial o sarcasm / smiles / laughter o interruption o use of expressions of disbelief o how much each participant actually gets to speak o word frequency count o pronoun use: construction of WE vs. YOU The aim of this exercise is to make conscious not only the fundamental principles or ideas dividing the opponents, but also basic emotions nourishing and upholding their different world views - emotions that appear ever more important as market shouting becomes a prominent feature of the Arabic mediascape.