The trial of the Dutch politician Geert Wilders recommenced yesterday with a ruling on which expert witnesses the defence would be permitted to call.

When the trial opened a fortnight ago, Wilders asked for a rather sparky list of 18 expert witnesses. They included some noted experts on Islam and social cohesion. And also a few, ahem, practitioners of the same. They were to include Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot, stabbed and partly beheaded the film-maker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004. And also Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the jihadist cleric who was given the red-carpet treatment in London by former mayor Ken Livingstone a few years back.

Sadly the Dutch court haven’t allowed these witnesses or most of the others, leaving the defence with only three witnesses. They are expert Simon Admiraal and leading Dutch scholar Hans Jansen (author of numerous scholarly books and the hilariously titled recent Islam for Pigs, Donkeys, Monkeys and Other Beasts). Most interestingly the court has allowed Wilders to call as an expert witness the brave and eloquent Wafa Sultan.

Sultan made her name – and garnered her first fatwas – for a blinding hit-the-ball-out-of-the-stadium interview on Al Jazeera a few years ago viewable here. It caused terrible convulsions across the Muslim world, and also apparently in Sheikh al-Qaradawi who described her home-truths session as consisting of “unbearable, ghastly things that made my hair stand on end.”

I much look forward to seeing Wafa Sultan take the stand. Though I slightly pity the prosecution for having to attempt to cross-examine her.

But I can’t help feeling disappointed that Qaradawi won’t be appearing. Although he believes talking about the contents of the Koran is “unbearable, ghastly and makes his hair stand on end”, I have always thought it interesting that he doesn’t find at all hair-raising – in fact he has even been quoted on his own website as defending – certain forms of female circumcision.

I was so looking forward to Wilders’ lawyers questioning Qaradawi about some of this. Whilst they were at it I had hoped they might question him about my favourite teaching of his. For Qaradawi has long been one of the world’s foremost prononents of the healing properties of camel’s urine.

What is interesting about this, and what I wish the court could have questioned him on, is why – since Qaradawi believes there is almost nothing that camel urine cannot do – when he himself had medical problems a couple of years back he abjured a steaming mug of the stuff and attempted to get into London to get treatment of a more modern kind.

Alas, now we might never know how he rationalises this. The Dutch courts have deprived us of this and many other answers by disallowing this one-off appearance in Holland by one of the world’s most dangerous elderly comedians. Douglas Murray in The Telegraph