Soon after September 11, 2001, Robert Fisk was beaten by a crowd of Afghan refugees near the Pakistani border. Only the 11th-hour intervention of a Muslim cleric saved the veteran foreign correspondent from death.
But Fisk, who has lived in Beirut for 33 years - reporting first for The Times and then, since 1988, The Independent - felt no rage towards his assailants, only at himself for fighting back. 'What had I done?' he wrote after recovering. 'I had been punching and attacking Afghan refugees ... the very dispossessed, mutilated people whom my own country - among others - was killing.'
He referred to one attacker as 'truly innocent of any crime except that of being the victim of the world' and saw the mob's brutality as 'entirely the product of others, of us'. If he were an Afghan refugee, Fisk wrote, he would have responded to the presence of a westerner with equal bloodlust.
In an age of carefully impartial media coverage of the Middle East, Fisk's empathy with the Muslim world and moral indignation have won him an avid global following. But some see his treatment of Arabs as patronising: even while trying to kill him, they can do no wrong.
His critics charge him with promoting a Manichean vision in which the west is the Great Satan and the Arabs are mere victims of its imperial designs. But even they often grudgingly admire his courage and experience.
Named British International Journalist of the Year seven times, Fisk has provided dispatches from 11 major Middle Eastern wars and innumerable insurgencies and massacres. While many fellow commentators unleash opinions from London or New York, spoon-fed by Washington think-tanks and recycling news agency reports, Fisk testifies from the ground and gives a voice to the people affected by western foreign policy.
He has interviewed most of the region's main power brokers, including, on three occasions, Osama bin Laden.